Terra master f2

Terra Master also dares with NAS, and has a wide range of equipment for home use and SOHO that we really wanted to try. We have had access to the Terra Master F2-210, a very affordable and really complete 2-bay TNAS, thanks to the TOS operating system and its 4-core ARM CPU that supports 4K video transcoding in real time.

Quite good specifications for users who need a small NAS, with power and also with an excellent security section to store backups and snapshots protected at the hardware level.

Before proceeding, we must thank Terra Master for their trust in us by transferring this NAS to us in order to carry out our analysis.

Terra Master F2-210 technical characteristics

Unboxing

We started this Review as always with Unboxing, which this time consists of a rigid cathode box of large dimensions for the volume of the NAS. Its weight is just over 2 Kg and it comes with a useful plastic handle to transport it. In the outer area, we only see the blue painted cardboard and the Terra Master logo on almost all its faces. Any technical specification information has been omitted.

So we opened the box in the upper area, and found the TNAS, as they call it, tucked inside a fairly thick plastic bag and in turn held by a polyethylene foam mold that keeps it afloat in the packaging. Next to it, we have a second box with the rest of the accessories that are included.

We should find the following:

• NAS Terra Master F2-210 20W Power Supply European and British Power Cables UTP Network Cable Cat. 6 Startup and Warranty Manual Screws for HDD or SSD Installation Screwdriver for Disk Installation Stickers for Labeling Items

The truth is that we did not expect such a detailed bundle, even with a decent quality screwdriver. Similarly, a Cat 6 UTP cable is also good news, although the connectivity of this TNAS is 1000 Mbps.

Exterior design

The truth is that this Terra Master F2-210 does not keep too many secrets on the subject of design. It is a device with a very simple structure and very small, practically just enough for two hard drives to fit inside. The measures specified are 133 mm high, 119 mm wide and 227 mm deep, designed only 1.35 Kg when empty. This means that we can place it practically anywhere.

The exterior design is entirely based on silver, which is widely used by the manufacturer for other products. In fact, the central part or body is entirely made of a single block of aluminum, while the front and rear are made of hard plastic. We only see a Terra Master logo on the two sides.

The front area features two quick-release vertical bays compatible with 3.5-inch HDD and 2.5-inch SSD or HDD storage drives. The opening system consists of a cover that we must remove by pulling towards us to unlock a lock on the upper part.

The truth is that they are very well made, in plastic, but quite thick and rigid. Of course, the disk fixing system is for all cases with screws, in this equipment we do not have fast fixation for the 3.5 ”HDDs as it happens with the NAS QNAP.

This will also cause vibrations from mechanical hard drives to spread throughout the NAS and the surface where it is located. And I can say that it translates into a rather annoying noise, so some anti-vibration rubbers would have been very useful for us.

In the side area we have the entire information and activity panel of the Terra Master F2-210. In this panel we only have a button to turn on the TNAS and four status LEDs. When everything goes well they will be illuminated in green, while they will be red if there is a problem.

Specifically those with hard drives, will be blinking when the drive is writing or reading information, while they will be off if we have nothing inside. What we miss in this front is evident: a USB to be able to put flash drives in storage.

Now we are located in the rear area, where we find the following I / O ports:

• 2x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A RJ-45 LAN Gigabyte Ethernet port DC-IN port for power

Next to it we have an 80 mm diameter fan to extract the hot indoor air. This can be managed from the operating system for different speeds, or an intelligent control depending on the temperatures. The maximum RPM is not specified, but a noise of 18.6 dBA is.

We are located in the lower area where we have the aluminum sheet with enough openings to put air and four rubber feet that honestly do not remove any vibration from the hard drives.

Hardware and interior

Here we are going to go quite quickly, since the installed hardware and the interior does not have much to show us. The rear area will be the one through which we can open the TNAS, removing four screws and completely removing its contents. All electronics are secured by a single-block metal frame.

In the rear area we have the two SATA data and power connectors for hard drives. As you can imagine, we do not have any type of M.2 slot for SSDs or PCIe expansion slots. On the PCB we only find two 5-pin connectors for fans, one of them being busy. And of course the connector that carries the data from the disks to the CPU in the form of a PCIe x4 slot.

The processor of this Terra Master F2-210 is a 64-bit Realtek RTD1296 Quad-Core ARM V8 that operates at 1.4 GHz. This is a processor widely used in latest-generation TV-Box and other NAS equipment such as the QNAP TS -328 or Sinology DS418, two well-known exponents in the home storage server market.

The advantage of this processor is that it allows us to transcode 4K @ 30 FPS video in real time in 10-bit H.265, MPEG-4, MPEG-2 or VC-1 format . It also supports AES-type hardware encryption.

Along with this, we have 1 GB of SDDR4 RAM directly integrated on the board, so the TNAS does not offer expansion possibilities. We also do not have internal flash memory, so the operating system will be installed directly on the hard disk that we put in the NAS.

Commissioning and first installation

The manufacturer has designed an identical installation system for the Terra Master F2-210 and the rest of the TNAS it has. It is not different from other NAS on the market, although we do have some peculiarities that are worth mentioning.

The first thing we will have to do is go to start.terra-master.com, from this page it will be where we can launch our TNAS. In fact, it will be practically mandatory to enter it, so we must have an internet connection and the NAS previously connected, and working with at least one hard drive inside.

From here we can see step by step how to install and configure the NAS. We will download the corresponding documentation, the software to detect the NAS from Windows or Mac, and even the TOS operating system to install it manually if we want.

With TNAS PC installed, the program will scan our network to locate the NAS. We just have to select it, access it by entering a new username and password, and we will directly access a small firmware through the web interface with the first installation

Basically it will ask us to put our user, configure the disk or disks to insert with the corresponding RAID volume and then install the TOS operating system directly from the network. Some very simple steps and in perfect Spanish, so there will be no loss.

TOS 4.0.x operating system: simple, Linux-based and very complete

The operating system that we can install a priori on this Terra Master F2-210 is the TOS, it is not a cold, but the manufacturer's own system (TerraMaster Operating System). This system is based on the Linux Kernel as it could not be otherwise and is currently at version 4.0.18 on the day of this review. However, this TNAS is also compatible with systems such as Synology DSM.

The TOS works on a file system of type BTRFS / EXT4, and we will be looking at all that it can offer us for network services, which are many. From the point of view of basic configuration and hardware management, we will have a very complete control panel from which to manage practically all aspects of the server.

In fact, many of the sections are entirely oriented to the services that the NAS can offer over the network, such as the SMB or FTP file server, web server to mount our own page, Telnet and SNMP to mount a mail server., etc.

Of course, when it comes to storage options, we do not have much variety in the management sense. It is clearly not at the level of QTS of QNAP or Synology DSM, in terms of variety of configurations and the enormous amount that we will have in the commented systems.

Storage and Backup and Snapshots

The maximum capacity is 28TB of storage, and the Terra Master F2-210 supports RAID 0, 1, JBOD, and Single mode for single disk. It's normal for two-bay NAS like this. The system, being based on Linux, supports EXT3, EXT4, NTFS, FAT32 and HFS + files, that is, those of Linux, Windows and Mac.

As we have commented before, TerraMaser defines this operating system as one capable of giving us 6 levels or layers of security for our files:

• Rsync backups: You could not call NAS if you did not have the ability to store backup copies of connected computers on the network. Snapshots and and SSD cache acceleration: snapshots are also a basic task to provide replication of the folders that we have shared on the NAS. Supports up to 512 snapshots for each shared folder and up to 8190 general system folders. It even supports configuring an SSD as an accelerator or cache. RAID levels: In this case we are limited to virtual JBOD configurations, RAID 0 and 1. In principle, it does not support bay expansion boxes. AES hardware encryption: This is the hardware-level encryption that is placed on the stored data. Backups in the cloud: it is compatible, in addition to its own, with Dropbox Sync, Baidu Cloud and ElephantDrive. File system cluster: basically it is a high-speed RAID 0 where to store large blocks of data for shared access. The system is compatible with Microsft Active Directory and Linux LDAP. Supports up to 128 user accounts, 128 groups and 128 network shared folders.

With PLEX compatible multimedia or web server functions

Surely the greatest capacity of this NAS is the possibilities it gives us in terms of mounting our own multimedia servers. One of the most interesting is undoubtedly Plex, the content server compatible with Smart TV and other equipment via the network. Thanks to 4K real-time transcoding, it is much better and more advanced than LDAP.

In addition, having Linux Kernel we can easily mount SNMP and SMTP mail servers, SAMBA, NFS, FTP / TFTP file servers, and even an HTTP and HTTPS web server. Supports SSL certificates for secure access remotely or through VPN to manage our TNAS.

It has a firewall system implemented, which we can access from the control panel and add security rules for access to non-secure sites.

With its own app store

And the app store could not be missing for this Terra Master F2-210, which does not come as complete as in other systems, but the truth, we have very interesting App. Many of them are aimed at creating multimedia servers, which is what this NAS is designed for.

But others like WordPress, MySQL Server or Mail Server are made to mount a web or email server at a fairly high level and very easily. This NAS doesn't have great hardware, so it won't measure up to complex pages, but it does for our personal use or hobbyist level.

Something we do miss on a NAS like this is the support for Wake-On-Lan, which most already have. Similarly, we have no means of mounting a multi-camera surveillance server or for home security. At least it is compatible as a Java virtualization station, for small applications and others.

Advanced system management with smartphone

We finish this superficial exploration by the TNAS Terra Master F2-210 with the Android application that will allow us to manage the NAS in a very complete way. TNAS Mobile is available on Google Play, or if we prefer, we can download the apk file using the QR code provided by the installation wizard.

We will have practically the same functions as in the TOS control panel, many and varied to manage the operating system and some shared folder configurations.

Final words and conclusion about Terra Master F2-210

In this way we come to the end of this review of the Terra Master F2-210. It is a very cheap NAS and with a lot to offer, clearly oriented to use in SOHO and home, we would say that it specializes in multimedia content.

We have quite decent hardware, although limited if what we are looking for is to do advanced tasks and generate large workloads such as multiple simultaneous backups or mount large numbers of servers on our network. The big advantage is that it supports 4K @ 30 FPS video transcoding and supports DLNA and Plex.

TOS is a system that we had not yet touched, and we found the experience to be very good. Very light, and with many functionalities for the implementation of servers even outside our network such as, web, SAMBA, mail, multimedia or FTP. We have very specialized and interesting applications in your store for productivity and entertainment, including MySQL Server.

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In this sense, we have lacked the support to mount a complex surveillance system or the Wake On LAN function. TOS is a very intuitive system, but it still lacks advanced configuration functions, especially in the field of storage and backups. At least it does have support for SSD caching, RAID, and Snapshots, which is very good.

It also has management from a smartphone, something that is always welcome in home-oriented NAS, and a very simple and intuitive installation system. Of course, an internal flash memory with the system already installed I think it would be appreciated.

Finally, the Terra Master F2-210 will be found on the market for a price of only 159.99 euros. If we put it in perspective, it is a very cheap NAS for everything it offers us, although we are a bit limited by hardware, we have enormous versatility and capacity for 28 TB of storage.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ VERY GOOD QUALITY / PRICE	- IN STORAGE AND COPYING, EVEN BY OTHER SPECIALIZED MANUFACTURERS
+ SUPPORTS 4K VIDEO TRANSCODING AND PLEX SERVER	- NO INTERNAL FLASH STORAGE FOR SYSTEM OR WAKE ON LAN
+ TOS SYSTEM VERY COMPLETE AND EASY TO USE	- LOUD ON DESKS AND TABLES
+ CAPACITY TO MOUNT ALL KINDS OF NETWORK SERVICES
+ SMALL AND VERY MANAGEABLE

The Professional Review team awards you the silver medal and recommended product

Terra Master F2-210

DESIGN - 75%

HARDWARE - 72%

OPERATING SYSTEM - 77%

MULTIMEDIA CONTENT - 80%

PRICE - 90%

79%