TERRAMASTER F2-425 PLUS

If outright performance is everything, you'll be hard-pressed to beat Terra Master's F2-425 Plus

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TerraMaster is perhaps a niche choice when it comes to NAS enclosures, but its products are usually well specified, with the F2-425 Plus being a case in point. This two-bay enclosure inhabits something of a sweet spot at around £330 exc VAT, where it competes with other high-end home and entry-level business devices. It’s certainly well equipped for the job, with spec highlights including an Intel N150 processor and 8GB of RAM.

Look closer and you'll soon notice other substantial upgrades over the entry-level F2-425. This NAS has dual 5GbE network ports, offering a theoretical throughput of almost 1,200MB/sec in a multi-user environment. Even a single user could expect to reach nearly 600MB/sec when transferring large files, but only if their computer and the rest of the network hardware also supported 5GbE.

The F2-425 Plus also comes with three NVMe slots. While this might seem an unusual number, it makes sense given that three disks is the minimum requirement for RAID5. With SSDs still at a premium, losing only a third of your storage space to parity data gives you more bang for your buck than RAID1.