We were a bit concerned at our first look at the TerraMaster product lineup. We were not familiar with this maker of network attached storage (NAS) drives, and the company's logo seemed a bit too close to that of veteran PC-accessory maker/DIY aficions Cooler Master (which is not a relation) for comfort. But as it turns out, the first TerraMaster product we've laid hands on, the F2-220 NAS chassis, is a straightforward version of a modern dual-bay NAS for consumers or small businesses. It checks most of the expected boxes and offers most of what you'd expect from a two-drive enclosure, including RAID 1 functionality, a smattering of third-party apps that enhance its functionality, remote access for "private cloud"-style storage, and access to a usual array of advanced networking features.
It doesn't break any new ground, but the guts are impressive given the $189.99 list price. That said, you pay in a different way for what you get: It's not terribly user-friendly.
Still, don't dismiss this NAS drive out of hand. It is affordable considering the hardware comprising it, and the F2-220 can fetch you some pretty good specs for the bucks, if you know your way around NAS drives and networking.
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The F2-220 is the company's newest two-bay device, and it's also offered in a four-bay design, the F4-220. Its base specs include a powerful Intel dual-core Celeron CPU (powerful, that is, for a NAS's dedicated processor), the J1800, that runs at 2.4GHz. (The four-bay model employs a quad-core Celeron chip.) Also, the two-bay model is paired with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, which is a lot for a NAS in this price range. (The lower-end models in Synology's line, for example, have just 512MB.) You can add another 2GB if you should feel so inclined. The NAS accepts memory upgrades in the form of standard low-voltage (DDR3L), laptop-style SO-DIMMs.
As for the drive storage, the two trays can hold two 3.5-inch conventional platter hard drives, up to 8TB each, and you can instead install 2.5-inch drives, either hard drives or SSDs, if you prefer.
Design and Features
The unit itself is dominated by bare silver metal. It's clean and plain in appearance, though we could have done without the big TerraMaster logo on the side. The chassis itself is not terribly large, only a little taller than a 3.5-inch hard drive standing on its long edge.
The chassis features two easily removable drive trays accessed via its front panel. The design requires you to lift a lever to dislodge each drive from its hot-swappable bay.
The drives themselves need to be screwed into their caddies. TerraMaster includes a small screwdriver in the box to help you accomplish that...
In addition to the trays and their levers up front, you'll see a power button, plus pin-head-size LEDs that act as activity lights for the two drives and the network connection...
On the back of the unit, you'll see just the basics: one Gigabit LAN port, one USB 2.0 port, one USB 3.0 port, and the power-adapter connection point. Also back here is the exhaust for the internal fan that cools the hard drives. It's effectively silent in operation.
The F2-220 runs the latest version of TerraMaster's NAS operating system (OS), which is dubbed TOS 3. Like most of the varied OSs employed by current NAS drives, it's a Linux-based OS, and it looks like most others of its kind. The main screen looks like a basic desktop, giving you access to a host of programs and added functionality...
We'll get into TOS more in a bit, but the most important aspect for home users is that it has a good selection of media-server tools, including an iTunes server, a DLNA server, and support for Plex. It also offers Time Machine backup compatibility and tools for running the F2-220 as a media server, Web server, or file server.
Like every modern NAS, the F2-220 supports RAID out of the box. The setup routine will default to making a RAID 1 array with your two drives, which mirrors the contents of one drive to the other for redundancy. If/when a drive fails, you just take out the bad drive and put in another without missing a beat, with the F2-220 reconstructing the data on the new drive. The enclosure also supports JBOD, where each disk is treated as its own discrete entity, and RAID 0, in which the data is striped together across both disks as one big virtual drive to enhance access speeds.
The F2-220 comes with a two-year warranty and currently sells online for about $190 without disks. (The four bay version, model F4-220, is $319.) That puts it in something of a sweet spot for bare-chassis NAS devices. It's not as expensive as some of the higher-end units we've tested such as the QNAP TS-251+, but it's only a little pricier than entry-level, name-brand NAS drives such as the Synology DS216j, and does have better specs than that Synology.
Setup and Software
We'd never used a TerraMaster NAS before, but we found the setup process on this one was mostly painless. We used two Seagate 3TB hard drives for testing, and simply screwed each into their respective trays with the included tool. We then connected the F2-220 to our router with the LAN cable that came in the box.
From there, we opened a browser and navigated to Start.terra-master.com. Doing this detected the NAS and popped up a quick-start guide that walked us through the configuration process. Here are some of the highlights.
For starters, this screen below appeared during the initial setup routine. Sadly, TerraMaster does not offer a smartphone app yet for either Android or iOS for this NAS, so this screen was a bit surprising. Apps like that are pretty much a staple at this point from most NAS makers.
At least the software detected our NAS on the first try, which was a relief. Having to endure a promotion for a different model than the F2-220 we had on hand was quirky, though...
The software then asked us if we wanted to download the operating system to be installed on the drives; easy enough...
Once the OS installed, the device rebooted, and we were up and running. The first order of business was to create a set of admin-level login credentials...
The setup routine also showed us our RAID 1 configuration, noting that half of it was for storage and the other half for "protection," i.e. a second copy mirrored in the array...
Uh oh! At the end of the OS installation, we got this unwelcome error message...
...but after we closed it, we found the OS had indeed been installed with no troubles. Whew. But that did not inspire confidence.
Here's what the main window of the TOS 3 looks like, with a row of icons on the left, and a handy monitoring window down in the lower right corner. It looks like other NAS OSs we've used previously, and it is easy enough to figure out...
The File Manager app within TOS lets you manage the shared folders. As you can see, we added a bunch of movies to the NAS...
By default, TOS sets up a folder named "Public" that any user can access on the network, making it easy to start sharing files right out of the box without messing with individual permissions.
Like most modern NAS drives, you can download, install, and run "packages," applications that are like bolt-on functionality. Many of them supply some kind of server functionality. Here's a sample peek into the Applications store...
We'd say the selection of apps for the F2-220 is smaller than most; we spotted only 12 apps total. That's about the size of the collection we saw from, for example, Seagate when the company first launched its SOHO/SMB NAS drives several years ago. (We're used to seeing at least 30 to 50 from most NAS makers.)
That said, many of the basics are covered, including a Dropbox Sync tool, an iTunes server, a Plex server, and a mail server.
We then started looking at the configuration menus. You can see the expanded trees on the left below for the Control Panel utility...
As you might presume, at this point, this is not a NAS you'd want to buy for a NAS newbie. Once you get past the initial install, this is a straight-up "no-handholding" device. It has plenty of options, but some networking knowledge is required to even begin to delve into them.
The backup options, for example, are the type IT admins love, with the exception of the consumer- and Apple-ready Time Machine. There is no straightforward shortcut option to back up from a desktop to the NAS, but you can back up the NAS to an external device.
You can theoretically access the NAS remotely using either a browser or DDNS. We tried connecting to it using the online connection service at TNAS.online, but we could never get it to work...
The manual isn't much help, as it suggested that we map a port on our router to UPnP, but it supplied no instructions for doing so. We looked at all the settings in the remote-management window, and it seemed straightforward, but we were not able to make it function. And this is not our first NAS dance, by any means.
To test the F2-220's real-world performance, we ran it through our retinue of file-transfer tests to check its read-and-write chops. We test with both compressed and uncompressed files to make sure it can handle both ably.
We use three simple file-transfer tests to determine how well NAS boxes perform: a 10GB file transfer to and from the NAS box (made up of 1,643 very mixed-size files), a zipped 7.67GB single-file archive of those same 1,643 files, and a 2GB folder made up of 165 MP3 files. In other words, respectively: a large test of a lot of stuff, a medium test of a single very big thing, and a test of a smaller amount of smaller stuff.
We also tested the F2-220's transcoding capability, as its dual-core Celeron CPU should be up to the task. Note that we used two Seagate NAS hard drives for testing, so your performance might be different than ours, though we've found most NAS-optimized hard drives perform similarly. NAS-specific drives tend to spin at slower rates like 5,400rpm or 5,900rpm, or have variable spin rates that are unspecified. The latter is the case here.
10GB Folder Test
This is a simple test in which we copy a standardized test folder of ours that is 10GB in size to the NAS, then copy it back. Keep in mind that your performance mileage may vary with different drives inside (the F2-220 ships bare, so you supply the drives), but since most drives these days are either 5,400rpm or 7,200rpm, it's safe to say these results will be pretty consistent with what you experience. (As we noted, Seagate does not cite specific spin-rate specs for these Seagate NAS drives.)
The maximum amount of speed you can get from a Gigabit Internet connection is 125MB per second, so with overheard you'll be lucky to hit 100MB per sec, while the TerraMaster was closer to 60MB to 65MB per second with our test drives. As you can see in the chart, the F2-220 wasn't quite as fast as the more expensive NAS drives, such as the QNAP TS-251+, but it was certainly speedier than the similarly priced Synology DiskStation DS216j.
7.67GB ZIP File Test
In this test with the compressed version of the 10GB folder, we see that most of the newer NAS models perform about the same.
These numbers were way closer to the Gigabit Ethernet connection's ceiling, at around 105MB per second each way for the TerraMaster drive. There's not much to glean from this chart, as most of the current NAS boxes ran through it like a hot knife through Nutella. They are all quite zippy with compressed files, finishing in about half the time as the uncompressed version of these files.
2GB Folder Test
We saw very similar results in this test as on our last test...
Once again, all the newer NAS drives powered through this test, achieving parity with one another, for the most part. Most were shy of the interface's ceiling, however.
Conclusion
The TerraMaster F2-220 is a strictly "by the book" NAS, in that it offers expected features and decent performance, but nothing about it stands out for its class. The overall impression we're left with, after sampling it, is that it's designed for advanced users who know what to do with a NAS without cracking the manual.
None of its features are particularly user-friendly, and when we ran into the issues we did, we found its lack of documentation confounding. The fact that its Web site and Amazon listings are riddled with typos and problematic English doesn't help things, either.
Overall, the F2-220 offers more than enough features to perform advanced media-server and file-sharing tasks, provided you know your way around a network. Also, it doesn't offer as many third-party apps as we've seen with other NAS boxes, but on the other hand we've always felt that some of those apps are superfluous. The F2-220 offers just the basics, but we saw no obvious omissions in the package selection.
Perhaps the biggest sign that this NAS is facing a stiff battle in taking on the current competition from QNAP, Synology, WD, and Netgear, though, is its lack of dedicated mobile apps, for remote access via iOS or Android smartphones or tablets. That's a pretty big oversight here in 2017, and though the Web site says "coming soon," we'd like to see the apps before plunking down money.
In the final reckoning, the TerraMaster F2-220 has some appeal for NAS-expert bargain hunters, but it doesn't stand out in a crowded field. We couldn't get its remote-access functionality to work, and most of the documentation needs major expansion or sprucing up, so it's not a product we'd recommend to anyone not proficient in the subtleties of the NAS world. If you know what you're doing, it's a decent deal given its specs. But most shoppers will find entry-level NAS drives from the likes of QNAP, Synology, WD, and Seagate more compelling and less intimidating, even if they have to sacrifice a bit on raw performance. Check out our guide The Best NAS Drives for Homes and Small Offices for some good alternatives.
The F2-220 is a reasonable-value dual-bay NAS if you're tech-savvy, but network newbies should opt for a model geared more toward ease of use.
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