TerraMaster has sent us a sample of the F2-425 Plus 3+2-bay NAS for review. It’s powered by an Intel Processor N150 CPU paired with 8GB of RAM, with two 3.5-inch SATA bays and three M.2 NVMe sockets for storage, as well as two 5GbE RJ45 jacks, and a few USB ports.
Since we’ve already written the specifications in the previous article, we’ll focus the first part of the review on an unboxing and a teardown to check out the hardware design, before showing how to install the drives, and giving it a quick first try.
TerraMaster F2-425 Plus NAS unboxing
We received the F2-425 Plus “All new 2-Bay Hybrid NAS” in its retail package. UPS took nearly two months to deliver it from Hong Kong to Thailand, mostly due to customs issues, but I digress.
The package includes an accessories box with a Quick Installation Guide, a Limited Warranty brochure, a Compensation Promises sheet, stickers for labelling hard drives, a 12V/3.33A (39.36W) power adapter, a power cord (US), an Ethernet cable, and a few screws.
The unit itself comes with two 3.5-inch SATA bays, a USB 3.0 Type-A (10 Gbps) port, and a power button on the front.
The rear panel features a cooling fan, a Reset pinhole, an HDMI port (terminal output only), two 5GbE ports, two more USB 3.2 (10 Gbps) Type-A ports, a 10 Gbps USB Type-C port, and a 12V DC jack. All USB ports are clearly marked as 10 Gbps, something we always appreciate…
Hard drive and NVMe SSD installation
We can press the top of a SATA tray to remove it from the unit by sliding it out.
I’ll have to purchase one more 1TB SATA hard drive, but in the meantime, I installed an old 3.5-inch SATA drive by clipping it into one of the trays. Once done, we can slide the tray(s) back into the NAS.
Installing an M.2 NVMe SSD required a little more work. Remove the two screws on the bottom side of the unit…
… and slide the metal case out. You’ll see the top of the motherboard comes with three M.2 2280 sockets for NVMe SSDs, as well as an 8GB DDR5 RAM module.
I installed a 1TB ORICO O7000 NVMe SSD in the M.2_SSD_2 socket for this review.
TerraMaster F2-425 Plus teardown
As a user, you won’t need to do anything, and you can reassemble the unit at this stage. But as a reviewer, I’ll look at the hardware in more detail. If we look into the enclosure after removing the trays, we can find a SATA board with two ports.
Let’s remove 10 more screws to take out the mainboard. It’s a fanless SBC with a large heatsink on top of the processor, although the NAS itself is not fanless since a large fan is used to cool the drives and system as a whole. The SATA board pictured above is connected to the board through a PCIe x1 socket with SATA signals (no actual PCIe to SATA signal conversion here).
Let’s have a closer look at the components on the board. The bottom left section comes with a coin cell battery for the RTC, and a small, replaceable module equipped with a Macronix (MXIC) MX30LF2G28AD-TI NAND flash with 2 Gbit (256MB) capacity, likely used for the TerraMaster OS (TOR) bootloader used to initialize the NAS and install TOS later on the SSD or HDD installed on the system.
The top left corner features a ClR CMOS jumper, a buzzer, and an ITE IT8613E super I/O chip for hardware monitoring and fan control.
The left side of the board features an internal USB port, likely serving as an alternative boot device (you’d need to use an ultra compact USB flash drive (e.g., SANDISK Cruzer Fit) since there’s not a lot of space), the SATA PCIe slot, a Realtek RTS5432 USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) 4-port hub controller chip, and two Realtek RTL8126 5GbE PCIe controllers. A UART connector is also available for people interested in accessing the serial console for low-level development.
First boot
I’ll now reassemble the NAS and fire it up. For a quick test, I connected the F2-425 Plus to a 2.5GbE switch and the power supply, before pressing the power button on the front to boot it up. I scanned the QR code on the side of the unit to install the TNAS mobile Android app on my smartphone, and the NAS was automatically detected.
If I tap on detected TNAS, I’m brought to the TNAS initialization window. I’m not going to do that now since I’d like to install one more 3.5-inch SATA drive. It’s supposed to last 5 to 5 minutes. I should involve installing TOS and configuring/formatting the drives.
We’re told that using a web browser for initialization is required if the user wants to customize the system disk, system storage pool, or create a cache using SSDs. So the mobile app is not necessarily needed.
That will be all for today. In the second part of the review, I’ll go through the initialization procedure, test storage and 5Gbps Ethernet networking, and various features of the TerraMaster F2-425 Plus 2-bay NAS.
I’d like to thank TerraMaster for sending the F2-425 Plus for review. It now goes for $499.99 on Amazon and the TerraMaster shop, or about $100 extra compared to when we first covered the device (November 2025), a recurring issue with current RAM and electronic components price increases. However, you can still use the CNXSOFT coupon for a 10% discount on the TerrraMaster shop.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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