TerraMaster F2-221 2-Bay SMB NAS Review

Bohs Hansen / 6 years ago

TerraMaster F2-221 2-Bay NAS Review

mall, light, and powerful, that’s the new TerraMaster F2-221. It is a 2-Bay NAS for Small Business and Personal Cloud Storage. It comes with AES hardware encryption engine, 4K video transcoding, and Btrfs file system.

TerraMaster F2-221

TerraMaster continues the same design that we’ve seen in the previous models. It’s a great one, so why change it? It is simplistic, yet beautiful. The general enclosure is made of aluminium while some parts such as the drive trays are made of plastics.

Inside the F2-221 roars the power of an Intel Celeron J3355. That is a dual-core processor with a 2GHz clock speed and 2.5GHz Turbo. The RAM setup is a somewhat unusual one, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad thing.

The F2-221 has 2GB RAM onboard and 2GB extra in SO-DIMM memory slot. That gives it a total of 4GB out of the box. However, since the module is replaceable, you can upgrade it with an 8GB module for up to 10GB in total.

Connection Options

TerraMaster’s F2-221 has a lot of 2’s in the name as well as when it comes to connections. It features two Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 LAN ports and two USB 3.0 ports. A basic connection setup that offers what you need a little more. The second LAN connection offers a lot of possibilities when compared to units that only feature one.

With that kind of a setup, the F2-221 is capable of reaching read speeds of 215MB/s and write speeds of 212MB/s.

Modern Feature Set

Securing your files becomes more and more important every day. Luckily the F2-221 supports AES hardware encryption for that extra layer of protection.

The advantage of having a hardware accelerated option here is that it otherwise will cost a lot of performance. However, the CPU has this feature built-in along with 4K UHD video transcoding. Those two features make the F2-221 an ideal candidate for home multimedia entertainment and small office applications.

Btrfs File System

My favourite feature is something else. Don’t get me wrong, I like the two. But the Btrfs file system brings so many great advantages over EXT4

Superior storage technology and optimised snapshot technology are the cornerstones of the Btrfs file system. It offers you advanced data protection, prevention of data corruption, and minimal maintenance expenses. What’s not to love about that?

The use of this file system promotes high data integrity, all the while staying flexible and efficient. Optimised snapshot technology generates 512 snapshots for every shared folder, and up to 8,192 overall system snapshots. If something goes wrong, you simply revert to a previous snapshot. Since data recovery takes place at the file or folder level, businesses can also benefit from enhanced flexibility and efficient data recovery.

Multimedia Capable NAS!

One of the easiest ways to stream media files is via DLNA. TerraMaster’s multimedia servers enable users to stream 4K media content from TNAS to multimedia playback devices. The device offers 4K H.264 live transcoding, along with the opportunity to convert and playback 4K video on computers, smartphones, and media players that lack native support for HD formats.

More Great Features

Naturally, you get a lot more from a TerraMaster NAS than just the above-mentioned features. Such things as an automatic scheduled backup, cloud drive backup, and simple remote connections are all part of the package.

The personal cloud offering can save costs and it also keeps your data in your own hands. Rights of access can be tailored for your colleagues, relatives, or friends, and with support for two-way sync cloud drive. With the built-in DDNS service called TNAS.online, remote connection becomes easy and free. There’s no need to spring for a static IP with this.

Small businesses, and power users alike, can benefit from the opportunity to conveniently build file storage servers, mail servers, web servers, FTP servers, MySQL databases, CRM systems, Node.js, and Java virtual machines, as well as a host of other commercial applications.

TerraMaster also offers the TNAS mobile app which allows for quick access to your NAS. That includes all the multimedia files you have stored on it. There are apps for both iOS or Android systems.

TOS 4.0 Operating System

With the most recent version of the TOS operating system, TOS 4.0.X, you can back up your data, manage your file server, and optimise your sharing services in an intuitive, simple, and user-friendly way. The operating system is the latest development and it has come a long way already.