Music is mostly digital nowadays, despite the resurgence of the vinyl. There are infinite ways you can store it, but one of the most convenient is on a NAS: a dedicated device which makes files and content available on your local network (and beyond). The TerraMaster F4-423 is a 4-bay NAS which offers great specs at an affordable price. But how does it fare from the perspective of someone who wants to use it just to share multimedia content?
Disclaimer: I received a free unit directly from TerraMaster. Additional information is available here. The F4-423 sells for $459.99.
TL;DR: recap
| Pros |
Cons |
| + Solid all-metal construction
+ Good hardware specs + User-friendly software + + Great value |
– Software is still somewhat immature
– The dedicated multimedia applications need improvement |
Rating: 8/10
TerraMaster F4-423 Hardware
The TerraMaster F4-423 is a chunky device, measuring 227 x 225x 136 mm and weighing 3.6 kg, but it’s in line with the competitors. The main part of the chassis is made of machined aluminium, whereas the front and back are made of plastic. The internal structure that keeps the drives in place is made of metal (presumably steel). The drive trays are made of plastic and sport a quick install (and removal) mechanism which only requires you to place/remove a plastic stick on the side to secure the drive to the tray.
TerraMaster equipped the F4-423 with four drive bays for a total capacity of up to 80 TB, and the device is therefore designed for scenarios requiring high storage capacity and/or high availability. This makes it ideal to store films, music and other multimedia as you can fit it with disks providing ample space for all your files. On top of these are two M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs, which you can use either as primary storage or as cache to speed up transfers and lower the latency. The process to access these, however, is a bit complicated as you need to unscrew the rear panel, disconnect the two fans and remove the main metal chassis.
At the heart of the F4-423 is a quad-core Intel Celeron N5095 CPU, with a base clock of 2 GHz and a boost clock of 2.9 GHz. In the slow-moving world of NAS boxes, this 10-nm processor launched in 2021 is relatively recent. Its 15 W TDP makes it ideal for situations where it stays powered on 24/7, as is the case for a NAS device. Early units had the N5105 CPU which is identical, save for the lower 10 W TDP. The F4-423 comes with a single 4 GB DDR4 RAM module (in SODIMM format, which is the same you find in laptops, as an example) installed, but there are two slots that give you a maximum capacity of 32 GB, which is enough to turn the device into a small server.
The F4-423’s connectivity includes two RJ-45 2.5 GbE ports (with the option of using port trunking to bring the speed up to 5 Gbps), two USB 3.2 ports (operating at 10 Gbps) and an HDMI port. The latter allows you to connect the NAS directly to a screen to act as a multimedia centre, or to install a different OS if you’re feeling adventurous.
There are two 80 mm fans on the back which keep the device and the disks inside it cool; they are barely audible during normal operations, even when you are close to them. As using a streamer like the Lindemann Limetree Network or the Arylic S50+ allows you to place the NAS away from where you listen to music, my advice is to do exactly that; in case that’s not possible, though, it is good to know that the F4-423 won’t be loud. On this point, however, a word of caution: my unit started buzzing strongly after a while due to the vibration from the hard drives; the only way I found to fix this was to insert some foam that acts as a dampener.
I’ve tested the device on a Gigabit Ethernet network (as I do not own other 2.5 GbE network devices, unfortunately) and the TerraMaster F4-423 was able to saturate the network entirely when using two enterprise 8 TB Toshiba drives in RAID1, recording 117 MB/s transfer speeds. Considering recent drives, especially those with higher capacity, are often able to reach and exceed speeds of 200 MB/s during sequential transfers, it is probable that you can use them to their full potential thanks to the 2.5 GbE connection. On the other hand, the NVMe drives have speeds such that they are only useful to lower the latency on a 2.5 GbE, so in my opinion they are not really useful in a domestic environment where workloads depending on latency are exceedingly rare. This is especially true if you store multimedia files on the device, as you don’t need blistering-fast speeds (and even less so latency) even with high-bitrate 4K movies.
TerraMaster F4-423 Software
TerraMaster’s operating system is called TOS and, like many of the competitors, it offers a desktop-like experience to access your files and features through any Web browser. The default applications available are the file manager, the app centre, the control panel, a backup app (to manage backup both to and of the NAS), a “remote access” app to allow accessing the NAS from outside of your local network, as well as a shortcut to the manual and to open a ticket with TerraMaster’s support service.
The control panel is quite intuitive and allows you to fiddle with all kinds of options, including the most obvious ones for a NAS (shared folders, file sharing services, access control etc) and some more exotic ones. There’s a whole lot of options which includes transforming the NAS into a surveillance station, into a block storage device using iSCSI, as well as in a cloud storage provider à la Dropbox using the TerraSync application. As a general-purpose NAS, the TerraMaster F4-423 is remarkably good and has few rough edges; although TerraMaster is a relatively new name on the block, it is making big strides in bridging the gap with much more well-established competitors like QNAP and Synology in terms of ease of use and completeness of the OS, which has now reached its fifth iteration.
Looking at the software from the perspective of an audiophile (or a cinephile, or anyone with a large multimedia collection), though, TOS only provides a single application to manage your multimedia files, called “Multimedia Server”. It is not pre-installed on the device, so you need to install it manually from the app centre; it is very basic and only allows you to choose which files you want to broadcast on the network through DLNA. There is no application made by TerraMaster to manage and organise archives of music or video files. In order to do this, you need to use a specialised software: the app centre offers Emby and Plex, as well as Docker which allows you to access other options as well (e.g. Jellyfin or Navidrome). While both Emby and Plex are well-renowned, they require you to purchase an additional licence in order to take advantage of the full features (like hardware decoding for videos, which is especially important for 4K content: without it, high-bitrate videos stutter and take a long time to load). This means that TOS does not offer any out-of-the-box functionality for people who want to manage a large multimedia collection.
From this perspective, then, the TerraMaster F4-423 has some catching-up to do with the competition, which offers full-featured media applications out of the box (though Synology recently removed hardware decoding from their software, so the competition isn’t necessarily better positioned!). The availability of Docker, on the other hand, and the ease of use of the Docker Manager application, opens a whole lot of possibilities that go well beyond those offered by pre-installed applications on competitors’ boxes. The only downside to the Docker Manager application is that, while it does offer an easy-to-use UI with step-by-step setup of containers, therefore removing most of the complexity that comes with Docker, it still requires you to understand some basics of how Docker works and it doesn’t help beginners by offering non-specific language (for example, it talks about “volumes” which, in Docker parlance and in this specific case, are directories on the host you connect to the container so that it can access files on the host which would normally be inaccessible).
One thing to take note of is that TOS is installed on a USB key on the motherboard. By replacing this key with e.g. a SanDisk Cruzer you can install any other software on it, including TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault. Those allow you much more flexibility, though they are not for complete beginners and are generally a lot less user-friendly. The more… enterprising among us can also turn the device into a full-fledged microserver with operating systems like Proxmox. I can attest that TrueNAS works like a charm.
Sound
Being this a review targeted mainly at audiophiles and other people who value sound quality, I couldn’t refrain myself from including a part on how the TerraMaster F4-423 sounds. The answer is that the fans are quite silent. You can hear them clearly if you stay less than 1 m away from them, but they’re otherwise inaudible. They often stop entirely, so the device becomes completely silent. This means you can be in the same room as the NAS without that impacting your actual sound system much.
Now, I know what you are about to ask: “yeah, but where are the actual sound considerations? How does the NAS influence the sound of my music?”. The answer is simple: there are no such considerations to make. A NAS simply transmits digital data via Ethernet. The Ethernet protocol makes it so that packets which contain errors are discarded. Now, this isn’t an issue at all on modern networks, especially if you use Cat 5e or Cat 6 cables, and even more especially if your software uses the TCP/IP stack to transmit data, as that ensures that there is a buffer and packets with errors are re-sent. Even if your streaming software is so foolish as to use UDP to transmit data (though I can see no real technical reason why it should…), the error rate on Ethernet cables is so low it’s practically negligible and won’t influence your sound (the linked document was made by a manufacturer of cables, just to be clear, so they would have every incentive to try to sell you better cables… except they operate in the technical world where audiophile snake oil doesn’t work, so they say any decent-enough cable works fine!).
In other words: any NAS will sound just fine because it’s just a storage device and from an acoustic perspective all storage and Ethernet cables are the same. That’s the beauty of digital stuff! No need to believe me, either: just read a book like Fred Halsall’s fantastic Computer Networking and the Internet, it’s an absolutely great book with loads of information on how networks actually work.
Final Thoughts
The TerraMaster F4-423 is a great device which offers very high performance at a very competitive price. In fact, it is one of the best NAS devices out there when it comes to the performance/price ratio, as it offers recent, relatively high-specced hardware at an affordable price. In terms of hardware I can only compliment TerraMaster for what it’s done here. The software, on the other hand, still needs some work, especially from the perspective of those of us who use devices like this to manage large collections of audio and video files; the in-built tools are very basic and leave a lot to be desired. Unless you have an Emby or Plex licence, you will need to fiddle with containers which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and requires a bit of knowledge to get it working correctly, despite the efforts by TerraMaster to make using them easier.
And yet, considering what the competition offers for the same price, I can’t help but think that the F4-423 is almost a bargain. It might be because I am one of those more enterprising people who like to hack into devices and alter them to their liking, but the F4-423 really offers a lot for the asking price. If you need to spend a few hours learning how to install additional (or entirely different!) software in order to have a great machine at your disposal, so be it! The reward is going to be even higher.
