TERRAMERMASTER F2-221, a NAS that deserves to be better known

Les NAS signés du chinois TerraMaster sont moins connus en France que leurs concurrents Synology, QNAP ou WD, mais méritent toute notre attention. Petit, léger et puissant, le NAS 2 baies TerraMaster F2-221 en a sous le capot. Il est livré avec un moteur de chiffrement matériel AES, un transcodeur vidéo 4K et même un système de fichiers Btrfs.

The F2-221, just like the other NAS of the brand, has an aluminum box and chassis which offer a very refined appearance: only the left side is struck by the Terramaster logo.The front face has 4 tiny LEDs: 2 for the state of the discs, 1 for the network and 1 for food.The discs fit into their respective bay by lifting the lever and sliding the drawers (plastic ...) to the outside.At the rear are 2 Ethernet Gigabit ports, 2 USB 3 ports.0, 1 HDMI port (to access the console) as well as the power port.

If this NAS can work with only 1 disc in “single” mode, it will also be efficient with 2 discs in raid 0, raid 1 or even in jbod (just a bunch of disks) just to take advantage of the added capacity of the 2 hdd orSSD, in 3.5 or 2.5 ″ format.

The installation of the discs takes a few minutes because the discs must be screwed to keep them on their drawer.This choice is certainly secure, but a little restrictive.Once the discs are fixed, just insert the drawers and turn on the NAS.

Once the discs have been installed, just boot and download the PC (Window and Mac) app that is responsible for finding it on the network and accessing it.

The rest is only logical and only takes a few clicks and minutes to install the bone specific to the brand: TOS (for Terramaster OS).The current version is 4.2.

TOS offers an office type interface to facilitate user navigation.It makes it possible to check the condition of the discs, to create network shares, to add users and to give them rights and to configure the advanced parameters of your NAS.The interface also gives access to the Terramaster App Store, which contains more than 88 applications covering file sharing, backup, safety, programming, etc..

A demo version is accessible here.

Terramaster also offers the possibility of configuring remote file sharing on your NAS, so that you can access your files all over the world, from any browser on a computer, or via the TNAS Mobile app for smartphoneiOS or Android.No need to use a static IP address using the integrated DDNS service called TNAS.online.

With its 2 network interfaces, the F2-221 is capable of reaching more than 210 MB/s in reading and writing.

One of the most interesting characteristics of this NES lies in using the BTRFS file system which offers a lot of advantages compared to Ext4, including advanced data protection, prevention of data corruption and maintenanceminimum.

DLNA is one of the easiest ways to broadcast multimedia files.It is thus possible to distribute 4K multimedia content from TNAS to multimedia reading devices.The F2-221 offers 4K H live transcoding.264, as well as the possibility of converting and reading 4K videos on computers, smartphones and multimedia readers who do not natively support HD formats.

Finally, this NAS (and its OS) allows you to plan automatic backups whether on your computer or your cloud backup (Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, NextCloud, OneDrive, Opendrive, Onecloud or Pcloud)).

In conclusion, the F2-221 of Terramaster costs around € 259.Price justified by the very good performance of this device and on a scalable OS.which offers 2 Ethernet interface and 2 USB 3 ports.0 If the HDMI port is not usable for the moment, it is likely that this is changing with an update of the operating system which is regularly updated.