Terramaster F5-221 NAS
A five-bay NAS that’s less-than half the price of rivals? What’s the catch?
TerraMaster is a new name for APC but it didn’t take us long to be impressed: the brushed, aluminium chassis looks classy despite it being less discreet than rivals. Physically setting it up is simple thanks to the quickrelease, plastic front panels, but you’ll need the included screwdriver to attach the drives to the bays.
We plugged it into our router using one of the two gigabit Ethernet ports, went to the quickstart-guide-recommended setup webpage, downloaded the TNAS discovery app, found the NAS and ran through the simple “TOS” operating system setup instructions. We tested using two, 12TB drives and were soon prompted to choose either Btrfs or Ext4 file systems before selecting a RAID array. Soon, we were looking at the TOS desktop.
The TNAS app also allows you to map a network drive to Windows. Meanwhile, a mobile version of the app enables you to browse files and backup your phone. However, mobile-based admin functions will only appear in future versions.
The device itself is not loud. There are the hard drives’ clicks and pops as usual (with a slight resonance) but they’re not too distracting unless under heavy load. The two fans at the rear are whisper quiet under normal operation.
The desktop will be familiar to existing NAS users: a desktop window gives you a (slightly delayed) readout for processor usage, storage and network traffic while icons provide access to settings and apps. There are many apps for many tasks in the official library including Dropbox, AWS, Alibaba and Google Cloud sync, various developer tools, backup apps, private cloud, web hosting and mail server services plus, media applications like Plex and iTunes server. Their usability will depend on what level of power user you are owing to the somewhat-underpowered specs.
Powering the NAS is a dualcore, Intel Celeron J3355 processor which operates at 2GHz with a 2.5GHz burst. There’s only 2GB RAM and you can only add 4GB more – plus, you’ll need to dismantle the device to install it (there are also two USB 3.0 ports and it supports up to 80TB storage). It struggled to transcode large UHD videos without horrible stuttering and you can rule out hosting any virtual machines. Having more than one person using it at once will likely cause performance issues.
Nonetheless, there are numerous backup features including compatibility with Windows-based Aomei Backupper backup and cloning (free version). Of particular interest is the snapshot backup technology which generates 512 snapshots for every shared folder and up to 8,192 overall system snapshots. Data recovery takes place at the file or folder level meaning it’s simple to retrieve old files and file versions without doing a full system restore.
Given the choice we’d prefer Synology’s superior DS1520+ but only if money were no object. The Synology costs $1,200 while the F5-221 comes in at just $549! Consequently, if your NAS requirements don’t stretch far beyond shared storage, backup and modest media serving, Terra Master’s F5-221 represents a welcome, affordable entry point into the world of mid-tier capacity NAS.
A relatively cheap and cheerful NAS for undemanding users. But it’s no professional tool.