A recent conversation with a friend’s dilemma triggered a train of thought. My argument was that investing in a NAS trumps any cloud storage subscription. When the opportunity arose for me to roadtest a TerraMaster F2-425, I wasn’t going to say no.
TerraMaster has been around since 2010, bubbling away with their storage devices that always seems to register on my radar, but never quite grabbing my full attention. But as luck would have it, that is changing right now.
TerraMaster F2-425: Hardware and First Impressions
The TerraMaster F2-425 was just launched recently.
As a NAS, it looks pretty much like the competitors. This one is a two bay unit, as denoted by the F2 designator.
The two drive bays takes up the bulk of the front fascia, with the obligatory hot swap tool-free trays that is common across all the manufacturers that I have worked with in recent years.
Next to the drive bays is a power button, a USB-A (v3.2) port and a few indicator lights. Worth pointing out upfront that these LED indicators are pretty mute and will not blind you in the middle of the night. Got to love that.
Getting Started: F2-425 Setup and TOS 6.0 Experience
I pulled out my old but trusty pair of 2TB Seagate Ironwolf drives and had them in the unit in no time. Just like the other brands of NAS that I have tested previously, I just have to pull out the rail inserts, put the drive into the tray and pop those rails back in.
The TerraMaster is a little less forgiving to alignment issues when installing the drives into the tray. Just make sure everything is seated flush – right into the tray and against the front, then try again.
Power is in the back along with the 2.5GbE NIC card.
There is also a HDMI out port as well as two more USB-A ports, one rated for 5Gbps and one for 10Gbps.
Once it’s powered on and hooked up to your network, you can find the unit by typing http://tnas.local into your preferred browser. Just make sure you turn off any VPN such as Tailscale first.
The wizard will guide you through the process of initialising the TNAS. Take heed of the warning that only one NIC port can be active during this process, although this is not an issue for the F2-425 – it only has one NIC port.
I went with the automatic initialisation option. Call me lazy, but sometimes I just want to see what a standard end user sees versus what Kevin would do given free reign.
There are the obligatory warnings that disk initialisation will erase all data on the drives. If you are using brand new drives, this should not be a concern. As for me, there is a reason why I keep an set of old 2TBs lying around and this is it.
The initialisation process only takes a few minutes, mostly just waiting for the TOS to download and install.
When it’s ready, it will ask for a device name, a username (please for the love of all things sacred don’t use Admin), and a password. TerraMaster will give you hints and recommendations here.
It will also request a system administrator email address to receive a verification code. Use a real email address here, and preferably one you will keep around.
That’s the last step before you are launched into the TOS desktop. At the time of writing, I am running TOS 6.0 which was released in late October 2025.
Visually, TOS is aligned with how their competitor OS looks. There is only so many ways to skin a cat and if you have used any semi modern computer OS, this would not be a steep learning curve.
TOS 6.0 First Look
A few things I like to check off with a new NAS, especially one that I am unfamiliar with.
I look in the control panel / settings area and tick off the basics:
- network settings, I have very specific DNS settings
- region and language
- time settings
- NTP servers
- hardware and power settings
- any automatic block features to prevent unauthorised login attempts
- system updates
One interesting feature I found in my walkthrough is the Security Isolation Mode. This is a specific security mode that firewalls the TNAS off from the internet, and limits all network traffic to the local network segment.
By that the TerraMaster will only accept traffic on the same subnet as it is configured on. If you are running VLANs, then you are going to break that connection.
It’s not a bad thing to consider if all you are doing is doing backups from your phone and wanting local file access. It’s not a magic defence against intrusion, but a handy additional layer.
Media Management: Terra Photo App Quirks
At one point in time, my default position is that a NAS is for centralised data storage – file access. But the proliferation of media creation on mobile devices changes the equation.
It goes back to the conversation I had with my friend. They were out of space on their iPhone and need to free up 20+ Gb to update iOS. The question asked of me was, should they pay for a monthly iCloud subscription, or just buy a NAS. Both options were viable financially.
Without hesitation, I said NAS all the way. Why? You own the data, you own the hardware. And you can do so much more than just backing up your media. It can grow with your needs.
To start backing up your photos from your phone, you will need the TNAS Mobile app from your respective App Store.
Login to your TNAS device, noting that username and passwords are both case-sensitive, and configure the options for Album Backup.
The key options here are:
- backup location
- whether you want it to happen automatically
- backup on Wi-Fi only?
- Do you want to pause if the battery level drops below 20%
There is no actual need to install anything else on the TNAS side – it is all driven from the mobile app. This part is fairly painless to do. If you have a large photo album, the first sync will take a while.
If you want to take advantage of Smart Photo Management with it’s AI Facial Recognition, then you app need to install the Terra Photo software on the NAS side of things.
This is where things started to go a bit wobbly.
Coming in cold to the TerraMaster ecosystem, I expected some learning curves. But given the maturity of the NAS market, general OS and feature sets, there were some unusual design decisions on how the Terra Photo and app worked together.
For starters, the Terra Photo app was installed per user. For example I installed it as my setup administrator account. I then created another admin user on the TOS system.
When I logged into the second admin account, the Terra Photo package shows it is not installed. I had to do the full download and install process for this user.
What is more interesting (and a little concerning) is that it shows all the photos I uploaded via the TNAS Mobile app using the first account as they were all automatically filed as public photos.
For the life of me, I can’t seem to find a way to change that – either on the TOS side or the app side. I would have though a privacy first approach would be the default way to go.
Secondly, the default path on the TNAS Mobile app is different to the default path set on the Terra Photo app.
On the NAS side under the Terra Photo app, it is hardcoded to look in the home\username\Photos directory for media.
On the TNAS Mobile app side, the default path is set to just home\username.
It is a minor mismatch that will be an annoyance for a seasoned tech person, but something more painful for the average user to fix. Especially if it was not picked up early and you are some 10k photos uploaded down the line.
But what is more confusing, is that access control limits who can access the Terra Photo app as a binary yes or no choice. Admins have access, users do not have access – at least not at the account creation process.
You have to go to a different part of the Control Panel and grant access to users per app. Weirdly enough, I did not have to install the Terra Photo app for the user. But yes, they got access to all the photos that were automatically uploaded as public photos.
Mobile App
To their credit, the core functions of the TerraMaster can be access via a single mobile app – TNAS Mobile.
The layout gives you access to the files stored on the TNAS, as well as control the upload of media and configure the AI smarts of the photos.
It doesn’t manage all the apps available on the App Center, but if you are playing in that space, you are beyond the basic end-user needes.
Power User Options: Docker and Third-Party App Ecosystem
I went looking at Surveillance Manager, but it won’t play nice with any of my cameras that I have run successfully on other NAS platforms.
From what I can tell though, the TNAS implementation is not as user friendly as other experiences that I have had. There is an expectation of a level of expertise with ONVIF and RTSP protocols. I also went looking for a hardware compatibility list for it but it does not seem to exist.
Looking through the application list, there are a variety of file operation applications such as CloudSync, Deduplication Manager, Backup software from desktops or between TNASes or to USB.
No modern NAS would be complete without a multimedia server offering. The TNAS offers Plex (of course). Emby, Jellyfin and TerraMaster’s own. No offense, but I’d stick to a platform with a broader user base for my multimedia server, which would be Plex or Jellyfin.
The broader App Center portfolio offers tinkerers options such as Docker support. If you know what Docker is, then you already know that it opens up a world of possibilities. Otherwise you can run your own PHP instance, VPN server, web server as an example.
There also appears to be a fairly healthy community which has made other self hosted applications available. These include as highlights from 156 apps currently published:
- Vaultwarden which is a fork of the excellent Bitwarden software for managing passwords
- Tailscale for private network access
- AdGuardHome for those sick of ads on their devices
- Immich for open source photo management
- FrigateNVR for better than surveillance manager suveillance system
At the end of the day though, how much you can load up your TNAS depends on your model and resources. They will need something – disk, RAM, CPU cycles.
Final Verdict: Is the TerraMaster F2-425 the Best Value 2-Bay NAS?
As an Android user, it staggers me that you need that much space to upgrade your mobile phone OS, but whatever floats the Apple boat. I ain’t judging. But taking into account say an iPhone 16 that still has a base storage of 128GB phone, that is about one-sixth of your storage to free up for that process.
Overall the TerraMaster F2-425 is a solid piece of hardware, with some quirky official software packages.
If your basic needs are to backup photos from your phone, a central place for file storage, it works just fine. I feel that the official apps are not as polished as the competition, but at the same time, those with a little more tech skills would be opting for third party apps anyway.
It’s worth me harp on about back up, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The TNAS can be one part of a bigger data protection solution.
It has a RRP of $419.99 which puts it cheaper but with better hardware than a major competitor, and right now they have knocked another 20% off for Black Friday on Amazon Au which brings it down to just $355.99 (chassis only).
If you are in the market for a NAS for the simple task, the F2-425 can handle up to 60TB of storage (2 x 30TB no redundancy) which can consolidate disparate cloud subscriptions for longer term savings.
DRN would like to thank TerraMaster for providing the review unit.
