Reviews

TerraMaster F5-221 review: A big NAS on a small budget

Minor issues during setup and with the software let down a fast and affordable five-bay NAS

by: Stuart Andrews

21 Jun 2020

Price

£319 exc VAT

Good performance
Solid value
Huge range of apps

Some issues during setup

The F5-221 is the five-bay sibling of TerraMaster’s budget F2-210, and the extra cash goes further than buying you an extra three drive bays. The spec sees the biggest improvements, with the F2-210’s slow Realtek ARM-based CPU replaced by a speedier Intel Celeron J1800 dual-core, while the RAM is doubled to 2GB, with the option to upgrade to 4GB should you need to down the line.

Otherwise the construction is similar, with an aluminium chassis, silver-painted caps on the screw-in drive bays and a bulge around the fans at the back – although this time there are two 82mm fans rather than one. You still get two USB 3 ports at the rear along with a Gigabit Ethernet port. The only other thing of note is that there’s space in the panel for an additional Gigabit Ethernet, which TerraMaster presumably fills in on its higher-end NAS.

We had the odd hiccup setting up the F5-221. First, we had to clean the drives by removing partitions and reformatting them on a PC before the NAS would complete the initialisation process. More annoyingly, a deliberate shutdown through the browser-based console resulted in an unexpected shutdown error message and a loud beep alert every few seconds, which wouldn’t shut off even though the status dashboard reassured us that everything was fine. In the end, we simply muted the alert sound.

That’s a shame, as while TerraMaster’s NAS software isn’t as slick as Asus’s or Synology’s, it’s quite well-designed, giving you easy access to the usual management tools and features, useful dashboards and an app store with a bewildering range of add-on apps. What’s more, five bays gives you a lot of flexibility around RAID configurations, not to mention space to upgrade if you populate three or four bays for now. You can also upgrade the RAM at a later date.

Most importantly, the F5-221 is a decent performer. It came in near the top in our backup file transfer tests, but didn’t fare quite so well for sequential read/write operations, and performance while simultaneously streaming 4K video – not smoothly – was solid, if a bit behind the leaders. Given the extra money, we’d go for the Synology or Asustor units, but if you’re looking for a big NAS on a small budget, the F5-221 is good value.

TerraMaster F5-221 specifications

Model number	F5-221-NAS
Price (inc VAT)	£319 (£400)
Warranty	2yr RTB
Dimensions (WDH)	225 x 227 x 136mm
Noise level	19.8dB
CPU	Intel Celeron J1800
CPU cores	Dual core
CPU speed, cores	2.4GHz to 2.58GHz
RAM/maximum RAM	2GB/4GB
Bays (free)	4 (4)
Drive type	2.5in/3.5in SATA hard disk
Max internal capacity	70TB (5 x 14TB)
RAID modes	JBOD, 0, 1, 5, 6, 10
Bay type	Slide-in caddy
Hot swap?	Yes
2.5in drives supported	Yes
SSD support	TBC
Status display	7 x status LEDs
Gigabit Ethernet ports	1
10GB Ethernet ports	No
USB ports (rear)	2
USB ports (front)	No
Other	No
802.3ad link aggregation	No
Load balancing	Not applicable
Network failover	Not applicable
Major network protocols	SAMBA/AFP/NFS/FTP/WebDAV
iSCSI target	10
USB expansion options	No (USB drive sharing only)
NAS OS/firmware	TOS 4.1.X
Main desktop software	TNAS PC App
Remote access	Rsync
Cloud integration	Dropbox Sync, Elephant Drive
Backup	Apple Time Machine
Media	Plex, DLNA server, iTunes Server
Surveillance	No
Testing and Development	Docker, Git, PHP, node.JS, Ruby, Python, MySQL
Other major services	mail server, WordPress, SugarCRM, Transmission, Joomla, Vtiger CRM