TerraMaster F4-421 4-Bay SMB NAS Review

Bohs Hansen / 5 years ago

Pricing

TerraMaster’s F4-421 is currently available for just £399.99 or $451.99 through Amazon. A fair price for such a device – at least if you ask me.

Final Thoughts

Today I took a closer look at another pretty new device from TerraMaster, the F4-421. And what a device it is, perfect for the busy office that requires a lot from its storage. With a quad-core Intel processor, upgradable memory, four Gigabit LAN port, and four drive bays, there’s plenty of power in every aspect. Sure, four drive bays might not sound like a lot, but when we take the latest 16TB drives into consideration, it suddenly changes. You can easily equip the TerraMaster F4-421 with 64TB raw storage.

The performance figures I got from the tests are very nice too and while you look at them, you need to keep in mind that INASPT is single-threaded and doesn’t take advantage of trunked connections. Still, we saw an overall great performance and one that has gone up from the previously tested F4-420. In fact, the F4-421 is capable of supporting up to 500 concurrent users. That should satisfy most offices around the world.

Speaking of businesses, the F4-421 is designed for SMBs. That’s not only advertised, it’s also clear on the features. Besides the hardware highlights mentioned above, it also features hardware encryption for as-good-as no performance impact and comes with the Btrfs file system. The latter allows for snapshots and generally improved features over EXT4.

Design wise, there weren’t a lot of surprises. After all, it’s a TerraMaster device. It comes wrapped in a beautiful aluminium shell with great looking details such as the pinhole LEDs.

What’s up With the HDMI?

TerraMaster equipped the F4-421 with a HDMI port as we’ve seen on other TerraMaster NAS’ too. Sadly the output is currently status-only and it doesn’t have an app to make, lets say a media player, with just a monitor attached. I’m still hoping for this feature to be introduced in the future, but only time will tell whether we’ll get it or not. I’d sure like it

Pros

Intel CPU with 4K Transcoding and Hardware Encryption Engines
Upgradable memory
Btrfs File System
Evolving OS with a growing App database
Four Gigabit LAN ports

Cons

HDMI port is status only at this time

“The TerraMaster F4-421 is an awesome SMB NAS. It’s packed with everything you’ll want for traditional performance as well as the security businesses need.”