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TerraMaster recently launched 9 new Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices featuring the company's latest software and processors based on Intel's 12th-gen Alder Lake-N or Alder Lake-U architecture.
One of the more intriguing models is the TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus. Not only is it one of a growing number of NAS devices that use solid state storage rather than spinning hard drives, but this model supports up to eight PCIe NVMe SSDs. Theoretically that means you could equip it with up to 64TB of storage, assuming you can afford to purchase eight 8TB drives.
Equipped with a 10 Gb Ethernet port, the F8 SSD Plus also offers a fast connection to your network. And the system's 15-watt Intel Core i3-N305 processor is an energy-efficient processor that still offers 8 CPU cores for processing power. It also comes with 16GB of DDR5 memory pre-installed.
TerraMaster sent me an F8 SSD Plus to test. This was provided to Liliputing for free, with no requirement that the NAS be returned upon completion of the review. This review is not sponsored by TerraMaster, and the company did not modify or approve the content of this article in any way.
The TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus has a list price of $800, but it's currently available for $700 as part of a launch promotion. So is it worth the asking price? In this review I'll put the F8 SSD Plus through its paces to find out. I test the system both as a NAS and also see how it copes when running alternative operating systems.
DesignThe TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus The F8 SSD Plus consists of a plastic case that measures 177 x 60 x 140 mm (6.96 x 2.36 x 5.51 inches) and acts as a sleeve around the motherboard.
It looks more like an external hard drive than a typical NAS. In fact, it's physically reminiscent of an older model that I own: the HP SimpleSave External Hard Drive.
Left: TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus / Right: HP SimpleSave External desktop hard drive Left: TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus / Right: HP SimpleSave External desktop hard drive Left: TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus / Right: HP SimpleSave External desktop hard driveThere's a power button on the top of the F8 SSD Plus and pair of vents. And the the base contains dual cooling fans.
The case acts as a chimney as the base is raised by two rubber feet allowing air to be drawn in by the fans and propelled up the case, cooling both sides of the motherboard, before being expelled through the grill at the top.
All of the ports for the F8 SSD Plus are on the back of the device.
At the top is a 10 Gb/s USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 Type C port and then dual 10 Gb/s USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 Type A ports. In the centre is an Marvell Aquantia AQC113C 10 Gb/s Ethernet port and then below is an HDMI port.
Below at the bottom is the power jack which connects to a 72 W (12.0 V 6.0 A) EDAC (EA10682U-120) power adapter that uses a country specific power cord with a C7 (figure-8) connection.
At the base of the case is a thumbscrew which locks the internal tray assembly consisting of the motherboard, fans and top grill.
After removing the thumbscrew, you can extract the internals by pushing upwards on the fans and pulling the top of the case outwards.
The motherboard has the eight storage drive bays evenly distributed on each side. The first four bays, numbered 1 through 4 are on the same side as the memory.
There is only a single SODIMM slot as this is a constraint of the processor, and the F8 SSD Plus is populated with a 16 GB stick of TerraMaster branded DDR5 (A-SRAMD5-16G) SDRAM running at 4800 MT/s.
TerraMaster says the system supports up to 32 GB of RAM if you want to replace the SODIMM that comes with the system with a higher capacity one.
The other side of the motherboard has an Intel Core i3-N305 processor covered by a large heat sink. Above this are the remaining four NVMe drive bays, numbered 5 through 8.
To the right in the corner of the motherboard is a USB 2.0 Type A port which is populated with a 4 GB Alcor Micro Corp. USB that holds the initial installation OS.
Whilst the F8 SSD Plus does not come with any storage, TerraMaster does include a set of heat sinks and thermal pads that can be applied to each drive you install.
These are the type that are affixed to the drive using twin rubber bands. There are sufficient bands included for two per drive, plus some spare bands if any break whilst attaching them.
Under the HoodThe F8 SSD Plus is powered by an Intel Core i3-N305 which is an Alder Lake-N processor. Intel typically uses the "N" code letter to indicate low power usage processors as part of their mobile vertical segment. Whilst Alder Lake processors were the first to feature a hybrid-core architecture using a mix of Performance cores (P-cores) and Efficiency cores (E-cores), Alder Lake-N processors are composed of just Efficiency cores.
The i3-N305 processor has eight of these cores and does not support multithreading. With a base clock of 1.8 GHz, it can turbo boost up to 3.8 GHz. The processor also includes an Intel UHD iGPU which has 32 execution units and a maximum dynamic frequency of 1.25 GHz capable of 4K at 60 Hz.
However, this particular CPU only supports PCIe Gen 3 and is further limited by having a maximum of nine lanes. So each lane speed is capped at 8 Gb/s. If the F8 SSD Plus wants to use eight NVMe drives together with a 10 Gb/s Ethernet port, then either the Ethernet must only run at 8 Gb/s or some magic is required.
That's where the ASM2806 chip comes in. It's a PCIe packet switch, and when provided with two PCIe Gen 3 lanes it can magically switch four lanes of PCIe Gen 3, and by doing so, can then support four PCIe ports. So now you have two PCIe lanes provided for Ethernet and four lanes provided for four NVMe drives, and then two further lanes provided for the PCIe switch which gives the four lanes for the remaining NVMe drives.
This does mean that although PCIe Gen 4 drives can be used in the F8 SSD Plus, the maximum theoretical speed of each drive will be only 8 Gb/s, less the 128b/130b line coding overhead, or just 984.62 MB/s.
SoftwareThe F8 SSD Plus has its own operating system, which is rather unfortunately named 'TOS,' and is an abbreviation and not a description. The F8 SSD Plus comes with the newly released version 6 of TOS.
TerraMaster claims "The kernel of TOS 6 is based on the latest Linux Kernel 6.1 LTS" however this is somewhat misleading. The latest LTS kernel is 6.6 with 6.12 in the pipeline, so they should really remove the word "latest" from that description.
Whilst on the topic of overreaching, the "Tool-free Installation, Maximizing Convenience" claim is also somewhat exaggerated given they include a screwdriver with the F8 SSD Plus. Why? Because although the access to the drive bays only requires undoing the thumbscrew, each drive still needs to be held securely in place with an M2 screw rather than one of the various tool-free catches, springs and other solutions currently available in the marketplace.
But I digress. The TOS 6 operating system is based on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). However, it has been modified by pinning 944 packages with priority -1 with no packages marked as held. Effectively TerraMaster has prevented any of these pinned packages from being upgraded, either to new versions or when security updates are released.
One strikingly un-Linux-like feature employed by TOS is changing the user id for the 'root' account to 9999, then blocking the account by using an 'x' in the shadow file rather than locking it, and finally allocating a user-defined account with user id 0. The account for 'syslog' has also been modified in a similar fashion. Given the predisposition of coders to sometimes incorporate checks on user names rather than their ids or effective ids, I'm surprised this hasn't broken anything. I did see some unusual behaviour for 'sudo' as well as 'su' in that they no longer completely work as expected.
Networking security is implemented using an 'iptables' firewall. If you intend to do anything fancy with containers then you will probably need to add additional rules to overcome the default restrictions.
Initial Installation
Having installed your NVMe drives into the F8 SSD Plus, the first step is to install TOS. One thing I didn't like was the lack of hardcopy instructions provided with the device. Instead you are given a QR code with a URL.
After accessing the URL, you get a screen demanding you provide an email address in order to access the online installation guide. Fortunately it doesn't have to be a valid email so it is both pointless and annoying.
After connecting the device to the network and powering it on, you will hear three beeps after which you should be able to access your device via the URL 'tnas.local'.
As up to this point, the F8 SSD Plus has booted from the internal USB drive, and the requirement for having network connectivity is due to the fact that it will now download TOS and install it to the drive or drives you specify.
This doesn't take long and the system will reboot when ready having shown a countdown clock that can be ignored once you hear the three-beep boot alert.
You next need to acknowledge an EULA before setting up the 'superuser'. Apparently this is for system security. But whilst TOS disables the root account, which is fine, it acknowledges that it will create a superuser for the system that is equivalent to the root user.
This appears to be a very Windows-like way to configure a Linux system whereby you create a user with administration rights rather than creating a user and then elevating their rights when required through the use of 'sudo'.
If you haven't exclaimed 'this is TOS' by now, the next screen may well make you. The system asks for an email before you can proceed, ostensibly to allow alerts to be sent to you. However initially I found that I could neither skip it completely nor could I get it to send me a verification code with a valid email. In the end it did allow me to skip the verification after putting in a fictitious email although it seemed convoluted to get past this point.
Fortunately this was the last step in the TOS installation and you are now presented with the TOS web GUI.
Configuration, Performance and User Experience
For testing I used my own drives. Initially I was looking at using WD Red SN700 drives but after Western Digital simply would not reply to my enquiries, I lost faith in their products and had to resort to using a mix of drives from different manufacturers in order to fill all eight bays.
I installed four Lexar NM790 4TB drives, two Samsung 990 Pro 4TB drives and two PNY CS2241 4TB drives.
TOS includes a disk benchmarking tool so I tested one of each of the drive brands. The Lexar drive recorded a sequential read performance of 848 MB/s, the Samsung drive recorded 849 MB/s and the PNY drive recorded 837 MB/s.
I was unsure why the write performance wasn't tested as I thought none of the drives were in a RAID configuration at this point. Looking at the drive partitions showed that each drive had been partitioned exactly the same even though I hadn't created any volumes or storage pools and had only chosen to install TOS on one drive.
To configure my storage I first created a storage pool on the Lexar drives with RAID 10 for speed and redundancy.
This simply used 'mdadm' to RAID the fourth 3.6 TB sized partition on each Lexar drive.
At this point there is not much more you can do if you follow the on-screen recommendation, which is to stop using the device whilst the RAID synchronisation completes in 1268.2 minutes. That works out at nearly 22 hours which seems rather excessive.
Once it has finished you can create your volumes which can only use either BTRFS or EXT4 file systems. TOS uses LVM to create the volume groups and logical volumes.
One option that is probably more useful when using HDDs rather than NVMe drives, is to dedicate a drive for caching. TOS again uses LVM to create the cache data, metadata, pool and cache logical volumes.
The final option in configuring the drives, is the choice of whether to reserve a drive(s) as a hot spare for a storage pool. I selected the remaining Samsung drive.
One of the issues with TOS, and to be fair this can also be said of other NAS operating systems targeting the new fad of NVMe based NAS devices, is that the OS is really designed to facilitate HDD based storage. When the target audience includes home users who may be NAS newbies, I see it as a failing of the NAS operating system when it doesn't lead the user through a more guided setup.
The initial documentation that the user is pointed to when first starting the device, finishes at the point when TOS has been installed. Whilst the user is then directed to creating a storage pool, the only additional information is to click on help link in the top right of the screen.
This will open TerraMaster's online Help Documentation which describes each function in TOS rather than being a user guide to TOS. For some new users, even this first 'Storage Pool' activity may seem illogical given you start with the second menu item rather than the first (Volume).
Anyway, once you have set up your storage, configured any shares and file services, you might want to get rid of that cat which is continually staring you down.
Fortunately you can change the desktop wallpaper and the login screen wallpaper.
Unfortunately TOS doesn't have that many applications and some novice users may feel disappointed that as a result they will have to use containers or virtual machines to extend their NAS functionality.
Containers are available through Docker although the application has to be first installed. To set up a container, I chose Jellyfin as an example. It was relatively straightforward although it is not the most user-friendly interface for new users.
Virtual machines are provided by the VirtualBox application and this is simply a step backwards in time. The current version available from Oracle is release 7.1.2 but installing the TerraMaster VirtualBox app provides only release 6.1.46.
Again the experience of using the application for the first time is frustrating. It is not obvious that the app only appears under 'all' and not within a category, for example 'Development tools' where Docker is located.
Once installed it seems logical to click on the 'open' button that then appears, however this takes you to a 'phpVirtualBox' login screen requesting a Username and Password. What you should have done is click on the text to open the full description of the VirtualBox application.
There you would see a helpful line that says "The default user name: admin, initial password: admin."
Now you can click the 'open' button at the top of the screen and enter these credentials to access VirtualBox. It is not smooth sailing after that but everything does actually work.
I had a quick go at building a VM using KVM. Just using my TOS account, which of course is the superuser, I installed a few applications required to give me KVM, messed around with the firewall to set up some rules so I could access my VM and basically was left wondering whether anything I'd done would break TOS.
As I'd done everything through the TOS web GUI I'd argue that everything must still be supported. This is certainly an area that TerraMaster could improve on. Not just the security but also providing a better virtualisation experience than just VirtualBox.
Having performed a clean reinstallation using the same configuration described above, I measured the performance of the 10 Gb Ethernet port. When tested using 'iperf3' the speeds were very good with 9.90 Gb/s sending and 9.89 Gb/s receiving.
Running CrystalDiskMark against a share I'd created on the NAS showed that sequential access was reaching the limit of the 10 Gb Ethernet connection. Sequential read reached 1236.00 MB/s and sequential write reached 1230.15 MB/s.
I also monitored transferring a 100 GB file between my PC and the F8 SSD Plus.
When sending the file from my PC to the NAS device, the speed fluctuated slightly but averaged around 1 GB/s.
In reverse, i.e. sending from the NAS device to my PC, the speed was slightly more stable but overall slower. It averaged around 885 MB/s. It also used more power, as I will show later.
One area TerraMaster has a lot of applications for is backups. I created a second volume using the two unused PNY drives as RAID 0 so I could backup my first volume onto it.
I used Rsync Backup to create a manual full backup and an automatic daily incremental backup. One point I noticed is that the incremental does not incorporate the '–delete' flag so if you rename a file, it will get copied as part of the incremental and the original file will remain on the backup, resulting in a file duplication.
I couldn't find a way of editing the 'rsync' command executed. I would also have liked to be able to copy the whole volume rather than each individual share.
As always, when testing with a newly released OS some observations can quickly become outdated as new versions of the software are rolled out. For this review I have tested TOS 6.0.500 however TOS 6.0.507 is now available as an update.
Other Operating SystemsI was interested to find out whether the F8 SSD Plus hardware supported the installation of alternative operating systems. I first tried Windows as this would give me the opportunity to run some well-known benchmarks.
The installation of Windows 11 Pro from an ISO on a USB was simple except that I had no internet. Using an external USB to Ethernet USB adapter I was able to update all the missing drivers from Windows with the exception of the driver for the 10 Gb Ethernet port. For this I had to download the correct driver from the Marvell website. Interestingly, and I'm not too sure why, but Windows automatically activated with a digital licence.
I ran a subset of the benchmarks I normally use when reviewing mini PCs. Instead I first looked at the CPU performance with Cinebench R23 which scored 4472 for multi core and 819 for single core.
Then I looked at the GPU performance with Heaven which scored 536 with an average FPS of 21.3.
Next I looked at both the CPU and GPU by running Fire Strike. With an overall score of 1937, the graphics score was 2092, the physics (or CPU) score was 9965 and the combined score was 702.
Finally I ran Passmark to get an overall picture of the performance of the F8 SSD Plus. With a Passmark of 2276.4, the CPU mark was 9951.2, 2D Graphics mark was 461.5 and 3D Graphics mark was 1457.6, the Memory mark was 2525.8 and the Disk mark was lower than average at 9998.5 due to running with only one PCIe lane.
I've only reviewed one other Intel Core i3-N305 mini PC and the results appear comparable.
Having confirmed that the port speeds matched the specifications by testing each, I then checked the NVME drive speeds using CrystalDiskMark. There was very little variance between drives from the same manufacturers.
The Lexar drive recorded a sequential read performance of 891.36 MB/s and 891.30 MB/s when used as the Windows drive MB/s. The Samsung drive recorded 892.53 MB/s and the PNY drive recorded 877.91 MB/s.
Under TOS, as described above, the results for each drive were slightly lower, but the Lexar and Samsung drives were still similar in speed with the PNY drives being slower, as seen here on Windows.
To finish Windows testing I ran Cinebench R23 throttling test whilst tracking the CPU Package power and temperature using HWiNFO64. For information, the Power Limits set in the UEFI (BIOS) for PL1 and PL 2 were 15 W and 35 W respectively with a Tau of 28 seconds. For the R23 run, the package power was around 27 W during the initial Tau period and the CPU temperature reached 94°C.
After this, the package power dropped to around 15 W and the temperature fluctuated slightly around 72°C. Given this was stressing the CPU over the 7+ minutes I was monitoring, it indicates that the cooling provided by the bottom fans was sufficient.
I next tried a series of Debian based OS including Debian Bookworm (12.7), Ubuntu 24.04.1 (Noble Numbat) and TrueNAS Scale (24.04.2.2). Unfortunately I encountered the same issue on each in that they did not manage to fully boot. Ubuntu once completed its initial boot sequence but crashed before getting past the option to install or try it.
This appears to be related to the ASM2806 chip as by removing the drives supported by it, each of the OS would successfully boot and install. However, after then replacing all the drives, each OS would no longer boot and displayed the same symptoms as before.
So I decided to try Unraid which booted fine. This would appear to be a suitable alternative NAS OS for the F8 SSD Plus especially as there is the internal USB port which is perfect for it.
Finally I tried TrueNAS Core because this is BSD based. It also booted fine but similar to WIndows, there was no working Ethernet over the 10 Gb port. Using a USB to Ethernet adapter worked fine as a workaround however.
Power and NoiseWhen idle or under low load, the fans are hardly audible. They do ramp up when copying a large file like the 100 GB example, however the noise is not unpleasant or of the type that is annoying.
VerdictOverall, the F8 SSD Plus has a mix of both good and bad points, with some middling ones thrown in.
Obviously having a 10 Gb Ethernet port and eight NVMe drives is good. But this comes at the cost of slow NVMe speeds. It would be nice to have a Thunderbolt4 or USB4 port, but TerraMaster's choice to use an Alder Lake-N processor limited the company's options on that front. Whilst the thermals and noise are generally very good, the fans do ramp up when under heavy load like when running a virtual machine, when they become noticeable.
The main negatives are the poor selection of applications, the lack of a good approach to virtualisation, and the questionable implementation approach of building TOS on Ubuntu. These factors make it difficult to recommend this NAS.
I also have some middling observations. Basically I wasn't keen on the plastic construction which just feels cheap. It would have also been nice to extend the tool-less design to also include the drive bays. And I personally prefer a separate OS drive especially as the current partitioning scheme wastes 9.5 GB per drive.
Overall, given that this is a NAS that costs $800 before you add the cost of populating the device with up to 8 high-capacity (and probably expensive) SSDs, I would like to feel assured that my NAS is of sound construction, has quality software and offers multiple fast networking connectivity. Unfortunately I'm just not getting that from the F8 SSD Plus. For a NAS with NVMe drives, it is just not high-end enough as it has too much missing functionality to be worth buying in its current state. Hopefully TerraMaster will take note of these shortcomings and address them in a revised mark II model.
I'd like to thank TerraMaster for providing me with the F8 SSD Plus for review.
The TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus is available for purchase from TerraMaster. The company also sells an F8 SSD model that costs $200 less than the F8 SSD Plus. That model also supports up to 8 PCIe NVMe SSDs and has a 10 Gb Ethernet port. But it has a 4-core Intel N95 processor instead of an 8-core Intel Core i3-N305 chip and ships with 8GB of RAM instead of 16GB.
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