TerraMaster has recently released the F4-424 Pro, a 4-bay NAS that’s advertised to be the most powerful in the industry to date. The 424 series is a replacement for the 423 NAS series which uses the Intel 12th gen Alder Lake N95 CPUs and it has double the RAM (it’s also of newer generation – DDR5 vs DDR4 of the previous gen NAS).
The two 2.5GbE Ethernet ports remain the same, as well as the support for a couple of M.2 NVMe SSDs, but another novelty is the two USB-C interfaces for speedier data transfer (3.2 Gen2). The TerraMaster F4-424 Pro goes above these specs, sporting an octa-core Intel i3 which can go up to 3.8GHz, 32GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at 4800MHz and an integrated Intel UHD GPU with a max dynamic frequency of 1.25GHz. This should ensure better processing power, but there is more because there is support for link aggregation, the network bandwidth going up to 5Gbps.
If TerraMaster wanted to go all the way, it could have added 5GbE or even 10GbE Ethernet ports for a phenomenal data transfer. Still, 2.5GbE is still good and the advertised linear data transmission speed can reach 283MBps. The tests have been conducted using 4x Seagate IronWolf 18TB HDDs configured in RAID 0. I was curious to see if the proprietary TRAID performed similarly, but, after testing the F2-212, I assume it would not.
As expected, 4K video decoding is supported and can easily be handled by the F4-424 Pro due to its powerful components and the NAS does come with the TOS 5.1 operating system, with a special focus towards a pretty much guaranteed passage towards the TOS 6. Since we’re not dealing with an ARM processor, I assume that the NAS will most likely be compatible with multiple future versions of the operating system (I point this out because the F2-210 has been left behind).
The TOS has received several updates over the years and it does have many more apps than before, but the manufacturer did divide them between official apps, as well as community-based apps which, while compatible, they may be less palatable to some entities (such as the qBittorrent app). Other than that, the NAS will offer multiple back-up solution, including the Duplebackup, the Centralized Backup and Cloud Sync. And the Docker and VirtualBox support are pretty much mandatory at this point.
Lastly, the F4-424 Pro NAS does have some interesting security features, such as the AES 256 encryption, DDoS protection, the automatic account lockout and the Security Isolation Mode (which will block any external access to the NAS – so no access to the apps either). The F4-424 Pro is available in the US and on some European markets, soon to be available in other markets as well.
You can read more about the NAS on the official website.