TerraMaster F2-425 review: a low cost local cloud backup and streaming NAS

Following our review of the 2025 series TerraMaster F4-425 Plus last week, which is currently at the top end of that series for Home and Small Businesses, we’re back with the low-end model: F2-425 in the 2025 lineup to see how it holds up.

What you need to know is that it basically follows the design principles of the 2024 series, with a couple of important changes.

Here are the most important specifications:

As you can see from the specs, this is designed to be low-powered. However, the clear difference with the F4-425 Plus is that it contains a much older N5095 Intel Celeron CPU, released in the first quarter of 2021 with support for DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, LPDDR4 (3200), DDR4, and a max TDP of 15W. It lacks the support of AV1 decoding, but has hardware-accelerated decoding for common formats like H.264 and HEVC (H.265) for up to 1080p video and Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV).

Before we dive in, you can view the different SKUs released so far for the 2025 series of Home and SMB users, with the most important specifications listed along with the MSRP listed below:

First impressions

The creme box makes a return, almost everything about it is reminiscent of the F2-212 that I reviewed a couple of years ago, so there are no surprises here. In short, you have everything you need to get started, as listed below:

In the box

• F2-425 TNAS device
• Power adapter
• LAN cable (CAT 6)
• Quick guide [full online guide]
• Limited warranty notice
• Screws (for HDD bays)
• Stickers

Design

Sadly, not everything in the home and small business series of the 2025 offering has received the metal shell upgrade of the F2 and F4-425 Plus series. The design is completely the same as last year’s series of two and four-bay NAS in this class.

However, there are some key differences from the 2024 series, including placing the power button back on the front, along with the addition of a Type A USB port. It’s not much bigger or heavier either; in fact, it weighs 100 grams more than the F2-212. Even with these important changes, the dimensions are exactly the same.

The front and back retain a similar style to the 2024 series.

On the front, you just have your two bays along with LED indicators for the HDDs and power. The welcomed change is having a USB port (5 Gbps) on the front for quick access, should you need to back up a USB drive, for example.

Around the back, from top to bottom, you have an HDMI port, a single 2.5 GbE Ethernet port, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type A ports with a reset pin hole below them, and a connector for the barrel port power source. Again, there’s no Kensington Security Slot present, which is a bit of a shame considering it’s a data storage device.

On the left and right of the F2-425, the plastic shell has the large TERRAMASTER logo, which doubles for ventilation and heat dissipation.

On the bottom, there are some holes to assist ventilation. The rubber feet are firmly placed and did not come unstuck throughout my testing and shifting it around on my desk, which was an issue on the 2023 series.

Teardown

To access the SODIMM, it’s a matter of removing a couple of rubber screw covers on the left side of the back of the unit, which are glued on; no matter how careful you are these things, they are so thin you will end up damaging them (pic) the left two screws allow you to remove the right side of the plastic shell to access the SODIMM. As you can see from the pic below, there is no SSD option here; however, instead of the bootloader being loaded on a USB thumbdrive, the F2-425 utilizes the same SSD flashcard as the F4-425 Plus, which is replaceable.

Getting to the USB port is as difficult as in earlier iterations of this design; that is because the metal frame makes it difficult to plug a thumb drive in or remove it, so you will not want to be managing that continuously.

Which brings me back to what I’ve said in earlier reviews, TerraMaster support staff actually encourage installing whatever the hell you want on their devices, and happily, the USB port for the bootloader is now easily accessible should you want to use it for your own flavor of NAS OS, such as TrueNAS, Unraid, or maybe Xpenology. Yes, because TerraMaster has now switched to a 256 GB NAND Flash card (3rd photo above) for the TOS bootloader. This is also replaceable, but you can also simply add a USB bootloader, access the BIOS and tell the F2-425 to boot from that instead of the Flash card.

If you need to access the NAND Flash card or CMOS battery, then four more screws need to be removed from the rear of the unit in order to take off the rear panel with the fan, then four screws from the motherboard, so that the motherboard can be lifted off and removed from the SATA connector PCB.

Setup

BIOS

The F2-425 includes an Aptio BIOS from American Megatrends [1, 2, 3, 4], and you can setup pretty much everything here including the boot order, which is locked to the UEFI OS, however above that choice you can enable or disable booting to the USB bootloader so this would still allow you to switch to a USB stick with an alternative bootloader and boot from it, or disable it to instead always start from the first disk with an OS installed on it.

Initial Setup

Setup is exactly the same as the F4-425 Plus, so there will be no surprises here. Upon connecting to the LAN and booting up, the F2-425 can be reached by navigating to http://tnas.local. If that doesn’t work, you can use the local address assigned via DHCP, which you can find using the TNAS PC desktop application, which is essentially a TerraMaster NAS finder.

The setup process is pretty straightforward, through a wizard, and in full below:

Registering

If you decide to not lock down the F2-425 in Security Isolation Mode (blocking all external connections) then you could setup a TNAS device id through the Remote access setting in the Control Panel (which must be unique). This works in combination with an online TerraMaster account.

Creating a TerraMaster account and linking the device online activates the warranty when you provide proof of purchase and the serial number, but it also gives you access through the TNAS mobile app, which allows you to complete certain operations, including powering off and restarting the NAS remotely. The mobile app is evolving all the time and has made leaps and bounds since I first started reviewing TerraMaster devices over two years ago; however, it is not quite there yet if you are comparing the likes of Synology, which, sadly, a lot of users online do all the time.

Benchmarking

A pretty cool feature of the TOS 6 is that it allows you to install directly to the NVMe M.2 SSD; however, the F2-425 does not feature SSD slots for storage or Hypercache, which is important to take into consideration before deciding to buy. If you want to use TRAID, as I di,d you’ll be left with the capacity of just one of the two drives.

A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within a Windows 11 24H2 PC (image above) connected over a 5 GbE hub was well within acceptable ranges.

I also ran the NAS Performance tester, which tests the link speed performance. As you can see, it pretty much maxes out the 2.5GbE connection. No bonding option here, though; it’s just the one.

TOS 6, which is now a year old, comes with an App Center that has a bunch of handy programs you can install right off the bat, such as Emby, Plex, Docker, as well as in-house Backup and Surveillance solutions that aren’t really in the scope of this review. As you can imagine, any media streaming services you would want to host off the F2-425 will work great, as long as you use Direct Play.

Accessing from mobile is only possible if Security Isolation Mode is disabled, which can put your NAS at risk from external sources, so there was no way to access it from the TNAS Mobile app.

It’s also quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past week, and I did wonder if the noise I was accustomed to with NAS devices would annoy me, but all I could hear was a soft whirring of the rear fan when the disks were not actively copying or reading data.

Conclusion

What it comes down to is the quality of the F2-425; you are getting a very affordable device here, so recommending it will depend on the individual’s use case. If you’re just looking for a relatively small NAS device to manage virtual machines on, back up your files, and take care of your home theater streaming, then it is a capable device that will do the job. It provides decent performance, takes up little space, and is, on the whole, very quiet. Two bays don’t afford that much redundancy, though, but you could expand on storage capacity by adding the 2-bay D5, or 4-bay D8 Hybrid DAS over a USB 3.2 (10Gbps) link.

The F2-425 is a good recommendation for anyone wanting to get started in the realm of self-hosting and streaming without putting in an old PC that will eventually cost a lot of money to keep powered on. This really sips on energy, and as we learned from the F4-425 Plus review, TerraMaster’s 2025 focus is all about low-powered performance.

Although it features a low-power design, it delivers better performance and efficiency compared with previous-generation CPUs used in last year’s high-end models.

This means the 2025 series offers enhanced performance, lower power consumption, and quieter operation — not a downgrade, but an upgrade in both technology and design.

As I’ve said in the past and will continue to say until things change, the downside is still the clear lack of community and even staff support on the official forums. In the past, I have had topics go unanswered for days, or there would be generic-type “we’ve noted this and passed it onto our developer team” type responses. If you are a bit comfortable with the command line, Docker and setting up TrueNAS or Unraid, you’ll be fine. You can do great things with this hardware. The apps are a bit lacking, and things don’t always work as expected.

Where to buy and launch discount

However, it does not change the fact that this is truly a great entry-level home media-class NAS that you can buy right now. TerraMaster does not appear to have a discount on the official site. However, there’s a 10% discount already on Amazon: normally costing $249.99, you can now buy it for $224.99 on Amazon, which, in my opinion, also makes it an affordable, great choice.

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