Noontec TerraMaster F4-420 4-Bay NAS Review

Initialisation and User Interface

Online Quick-Start Guide

TerraMaster offers an online quick start guide. In 7 small steps, it will show you everything you need to know to get started with your new NAS. It offers information, download links, and even an installation video.

Locate Your TerraMaster NAS Units

Locating the NAS is the first thing you need to do to get started. There are various ways to do this, for example, from your network neighbourhood or through the companion app called TNAS. TNAS is available for Windows and MacOS systems and it looks like the screenshot below.

TNAS is a small desktop application with the main purpose of locating your TerraMaster NAS’. It doesn’t have a lot of functions, but you can log in to the GUI, browse the files, and map network drives with assistance by TNAS PC. Double-Click the NAS in the list and get started with the device initialisation.

Install Your New TerraMaster F4-420

The initialisation of your new TerraMaster NAS won’t take long. It will first check your drive’s health after which you get the choice between an online or local OS installation. And with that, you’re already half-way done. Define your admin user details and time zone before you pick your drive setup. And that is it, all there is to the setup of your new NAS.

Do You Have Trouble Installing your TerraMaster NAS?

You might run into one problem when turning it on the first time. Your NAS won’t boot. This happens if the installed drives already contain a RAID setup. This isn’t an error, but an intended feature. The device doesn’t want you to accidentally delete an array from another system. Clear the drives from their current setup and try again. The TerraMaster NAS will now start as it should.

Graphic User Interface (GUI) and Dashboard

Noontec TerraMaster NAS units are running TOS 3 (TerraMaster Operating System). It comes with a list of beautiful images which are used for the desktop and login background.

The dashboard works the same way your normal desktop does. You have a taskbar at the top and double-clicking icons on the desktop will launch them.

Control Panel

You can change all the NAS’ settings within the Control Panel. From user and share control, over storage setup, and NAS configuration. The initial page features large icons for quick navigation to your desired section.

Once you enter a section, the control panel changes to a treeview selection with individual pages for everything.

Storage Management

The storage management is also located within the Control Panel. Check up on your drives, manage your volumes, and mount remote storage. You also get access to external-connected storage drives from here.

Resource Monitoring

Being able to keep an eye on your system’s utilisation is important. TOS has a simple, but effective and fast loading, resource monitor. There are individual graphs for the various aspects such as the two LAN ports.

CPU utilisation is also shown per core. Maybe it’s just a single-threaded app that bottlenecks you which is easily found with this tool.

Package Center

You can install additional features through the Application app. The four recommended apps are probably those that will be used by most and a good fit for a suggestion area. Media streaming and file synchronisation, but there are a lot more than those

More of the User Interface

This was just a brief first-view of the NAS user interface. We got a brand new dedicated page for a complete view of the OS and its features. Instead of showing you the same again and again in every review, more or less, we now have a general OS article for every NAS brand we review. That will save a lot of time on the creation of each NAS review which in return allows us to bring you more quality content, more reviews, and more unique articles.

You can check out our introduction on TerraMaster’s Operating System (TOS) by clicking here.