TerraMaster F2-212 Assessment: Entry-Degree NAS with Choices

Value When Reviewed

$169.99

Greatest Costs Right this moment: TerraMaster F2-212

$169.99

$169.99

TerraMaster has caught with an aesthetic of an aluminium tube with sliver-painted plastic end-caps that has wanted a revamp for some years.

With the F2-212, reviewed right here, and its F4-212 bigger brother, a brand new minimalist styling has been revealed that makes these merchandise look a lot nearer to these of Synology in look.

Nevertheless, TerraMaster all the time likes to take the trail much less worn, and the F2-212 diverges from the earlier TerraMaster F2-210 in some vital ways in which may make this the entry-level NAS to personal.

Relying on the mannequin chosen, F2-212 or F4-212, this is similar NAS system, however the F2-212 has twin drive bays, whereas the F2-214 provides locations for 4 2.5- or 3.5in HDD or SSDs. As well as, Terrmaster additionally makes a 3rd associated machine, the U4-212, which is a rack-mounted chassis with 4 drive bays.

These entry-level machines lack the Intel Celeron processors, NVMe slots and upgradable reminiscence, that are options that TerraMaster’s higher-end NAS merchandise provide.

However even with out a few of these issues, the F2-212 has just a few options that can shock many and will concern the likes of Synology and QNAP.

Design & Construct

• New styling
• No reminiscence upgrades
• Drive trays don’t lock

As talked about, the F2-212 has embraced a brand new black minimalist look that’s decidedly extra business-like than the earlier silver TerraMaster motif.

Whereas simplicity is nice, on this case, the designers might need taken the characteristic discount barely too far. Consequently, the entrance of the NAS sports activities solely two drive bays, a label and three tiny LED indicators. There are not any front-facing USB ports, and even the ability button is relocated to the rear.

On the again is the ability swap, two USB ports and a gigabit LAN port, together with a safety slot and the ability provide inlet. The exterior development is fully plastic, however the texture and embedded logos make for a complicated look, even when TerraMaster caught a large yellow assist sticker on one aspect.

Inside is a pressed metal cage on which the plastic drive trays trip, and the motherboard is vertically mounted. A sneaky look inside reveals that the reminiscence isn’t slot-mounted, however it’s a part of the mainboard and, subsequently not upgradable.

As an alternative of the everyday laptop computer PSU, the F2-212 has a region-specific energy socket brick, and the UK pin format PSU is made to output 12v at 4A (48W).

One of many barely odd and doubtlessly problematic options is the drive trays that aren’t like every from earlier TerraMaster designs I’ve seen.

It has a sprung launch mechanism that doesn’t lock, so inquisitive fingers may simply dislodge a drive whereas it was operating, leading to disaster.

The engineering TerraMaster used reveals that the F2-212 was designed from the attitude of being cheap to assemble however inherently dependable. However these priorities haven’t considerably undermined its NAS performance for many who need a simple-to-deploy gadget for media serving or private cloud providers.

Specs & Options

• Realtek 1619B SoC
• Solely two USB ports
• One is USB 3.0

The place the extra highly effective NAS machines at the moment are utilizing Intel Celeron or AMD Ryzen platforms, entry-level designs just like the F2-212 nonetheless use ARM SoC methods on which this complete class of machine was conceived.

That mentioned, the SoC on this NAS is a latest design, the Realtek 1619B, a chip initially made to be used in TV bins. It makes use of Cortex-A55 microarchitecture and contains measurement cores that may every run at as much as 1.3GHz.

The utmost reminiscence capability on that SoC is 4GB, however on this implementation, it’s equipped with simply 1GB of RAM with no means to extend that quantity. Alongside the hex-core CPU, this SoC additionally has a Mali-G51 MP3 GPU with transcoding talents that may convert video in real-time.

A characteristic of this silicon that isn’t used right here by TerraMaster is that it has built-in Wi-Fi assist and Bluetooth, nevertheless it does use USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet performance.

USB is concentrated into two ports, one being USB 3.0 (aka USB 3.2 Gen 1) and the opposite USB 2.0.

If this design has a weak point, it’s that just one port has the sooner USB 3.0 spec and that there are solely two USB ports in whole. USB 2.0 ports are advantageous for connecting printers however for these wanting to make use of exterior drives or a 2.5GbE LAN port adapter, solely having a single port for this use might be limiting.

It is likely to be potential to make use of a USB hub to assist mitigate this situation, however I wouldn’t purchase it primarily based on that assumption. TerraMaster does make a 2.5GbE LAN adapter that can work with this machine, in order that is likely to be the best way to go.

As every drive bay can take as much as 22TB capability drives, you possibly can put as much as 44TB on this one tiny enclosure. Or, you possibly can select to reinforce the efficiency by mixing a standard onerous drive with a SATA SSD.

Efficiency

• Single Gigabit LAN
• 1GB of reminiscence
• USB 2.5GbE LAN adapter possibility

With the F2-212 out of the field, the perfect efficiency you possibly can realistically count on is round 115MB/s over the Gigabit Ethernet, which is the theoretical restrict for this interface.

As a single standard onerous drive ought to have the ability to attain that velocity nearly regardless of its specification, utilizing an SSD to cache that drive wouldn’t present any profit.

Nevertheless, with a 2.5GbE LAN port that may be added as an improve, the velocity of that interface is quicker than a single standard drive. In that situation, one strategy is to cache a single HDD drive utilizing a SATA SSD, or one other to make use of two HDDs in a stripe for efficiency in a RAID 0 configuration.

The F2-212 can use any of those two choices or a 3rd technique of SATA SSDs as storage to ship greater than sufficient efficiency to saturate the LAN, even at 2.5GbE.

With solely 1GB of RAM and no means to improve it, the variety of apps you possibly can run isn’t large, however it could be sufficient to run Plex and private cloud providers.

These desirous to run numerous apps might want to take a look at a NAS that isn’t ARM-powered, utilizing an Intel or AMD CPU to deal with extra processing and nice RAM.

In contrast with older designs, the Realtek 1619B is significantly better, and as a quad-core processor, it doesn’t are inclined to get overrun like among the prior dual-core NAS processors. This chip helps show output, however there are not any HDMI ports on the F2-212.

As already revealed, it’s potential to place a USB 2.5GbE LAN adapter on this machine, though, on the time of writing our evaluate, I haven’t seen this merchandise to check how that addon performs.

The snag with utilizing this feature is that reaching the 230MB/s ranges of that interface would require both two onerous drives mounted in RAID 0 (striped) mode or one drive with an SSD caching studying and writing.

With a machine with solely two bays and a single USB 3.0 port, decisions should be made that may be averted on a NAS with extra bays or USB ports.

That mentioned, in comparison with many NAS makers that don’t enable for two.5GbE adapters or to make use of SSDs as storage or cache on their entry-level {hardware}, it gives the F2-212 with extra choices than most options.

Value & Availabilty

The value of the TerraMaster F2-212 is simply £169 within the UK on Amazon, and the USB 2.5GbE LAN adapter is one other £30 for many who need that further efficiency.

US clients can discover it for $169.99 on Amazon and Newegg.com, which appears affordable for an entry-level NAS with this specification.

One problem for TerraMaster is that the just about identically specified Synology DS223j is simply round $25 extra in most areas, and it helps the Synology DSM 7.2 OS and its related software program platform.

Nevertheless, the Synology NAS doesn’t assist USB 2.5GbE LAN adapters, and a few triple-A DSM app titles are lacking from these made out there for the DS223j.

Subsequently, in case you are shopping for the DS223j due to the Synology apps, you’ll want to verify that the software program you wish to use is supported on that machine, and also you additionally want to contemplate that the place the F2-212 has a number of enlargement pathways which can be lacking from the DS223j.

The DS223j does have two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, permitting for extra USB storage enlargement for those who intend to make use of it for file sharing.

Verify our chart of the best NAS drives for extra choices.

Must you purchase the TerraMaster F2-212?

It’s onerous to speak concerning the F2-212 with out mentioning the Synology DS223j since, on paper, these have very comparable specs.

With the prevalence of the Synology software program packages and a preferable USB format, the additional value of the DS223j is tempting.

Nevertheless, whereas the {hardware} is analogous, TerraMaster designers are a lot much less paranoid about damaging the gross sales of the higher-specification NAS from this model. Subsequently, the F2-212 contains the flexibility to improve to 2.5 GbE and use SATA SSDs for storage and caching, that are options lacking from the Synology NAS.

The place Gigabit Ethernet limits the DS223j, the F2-212 can switch recordsdata at twice that velocity, saving numerous time for these dumping massive video recordsdata to and from their NAS.

Additionally, on the F2-212, utilizing an SSD internally is worth it to cache a single massive HDD, whereas, with the Synology DS223j, there may be little level because the HDD can saturate the LAN port.

You should utilize 22TB drives on this NAS, which permits for as much as 44TB internally for those who don’t use RAID 1 mirror mode. An outlay of $550 ($350 for a single Seagate Iron Wolf 22TB) should buy a system with sufficient area for a humungous quantity of flicks, music and pictures.

That’s an enormous motive for getting this NAS over different entry-level machines, because it provides options Synology doesn’t embrace in its home-orientated merchandise, solely in enterprise fashions.

General, with a complete worth of round $200 for the F2-212, together with the two.5 GbE adapter and the flexibility to make use of any capability SATA drives, that is the right first NAS for a lot of clients.

Though, for these with greater than two drives useful, its F4-212 brother is likely to be the higher alternative.

Specs

• CPU: Realtek 1619B
• GPU: ARM Mali-G51 MP3
• RAM: 1GB DDR4 (not upgradable)
• Drive Bays: 2x 3.5/2.5 SATA
• M.2 Drive Slots: N/A
• Most Drives with Growth: 7 utilizing D5-300C enlargement
• USB: 1x USB 3.2 Gen1, 1x USB 2.0
• Video Outputs: N/A
• Raid Varieties: RAID 0/1, Single, JBOD
• Weight: 1.3 Kg
• Dimensions: 222 x 119 x 154 mm
• Networking: 1x 1GbE Ethernet (100/1000)
• OS: TOS 5.1
• Inner File Programs: Btrfs, EXT4
• Exterior File Programs: EXT4, NTFS, FAT32, HFS+, exFAT
• OS Languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Magyar, Chinese language, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese and Russian