TerraMaster F4-424 Specs and Usable Capacity

Published specifications for the TerraMaster F4-424, a 2023 model, together with the number the manufacturer page will not give you: how much usable capacity you actually get from 4 bays under each storage layout, at every drive size worth buying. Four bays, N95, 8 GB DDR5 and dual 2.5GbE for well under what the equivalent Synology costs. The trade is software maturity.

TerraMaster F4-424 specifications

Specifications come from manufacturer published data. Vendors sometimes ship the same model number with different memory fitted or drives included, so confirm against the listing for the exact unit you are buying. Where a figure is not published, the row is omitted rather than estimated.

On the M.2 slots: M.2 NVMe slots for cache.

How much usable storage does the F4-424 actually give you?

Raw capacity is bays multiplied by drive size. Usable capacity is what survives after parity, and it is always a whole number of drives smaller. Every figure below is computed from 4 identical drives using the same engine behind our cross-vendor RAID capacity calculator, so you can check it.

All capacities are decimal terabytes, the unit printed on the drive label. Your NAS interface will report binary tebibytes and label them "TB", which makes every figure look about 9.05 percent smaller. Nothing is missing: one TB is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes and one TiB is 1,099,511,627,776, so the ratio is a fixed 0.909495. See the TB against TiB chart for the conversion at every capacity, and expect the filesystem to take a further one to two percent on top.

Which RAID level should you run on a 4 bay NAS?

This unit uses standard RAID levels only, so every drive is truncated to the size of the smallest member. That matters most when you upgrade: replacing two of 4 drives with larger ones gains you nothing at all until every member is upgraded.

Past 8 to 10 TB per drive, run double parity. With 20 TB drives in this chassis a single-parity rebuild must read roughly 60 TB from the surviving members. At a realistic 80 to 150 MB per second that is well over a day of continuous reading across drives that are the same age and often from the same batch, and it puts about a 38 percent chance of meeting an unrecoverable read error against the rated floor for NAS drives. Treat that as a way to rank layouts, not a forecast: the rating is a warranty floor rather than a measurement, and modern systems survive a single read error rather than aborting.

Run your own drive set through the RAID capacity calculator to see the same comparison with mixed sizes, and the drive failure probability calculator to put annualised failure rates against 4 drives over several years.

What drives should you put in a F4-424?

The enclosure is the cheap part. 4 drives at $200 to $500 each is an $800 to $2,000 purchase, and unlike the box the drives get replaced and upgraded over the life of the array. Two requirements are not negotiable: CMR recording, never SMR, because shingled drives can take days to rebuild an array, and a published NAS workload rating of at least 180 TB per year.

Buy all the drives at once if you can afford it, so they age together and you know their history. Buying them from different retailers or in two batches is a cheap way to avoid every drive coming from the same manufacturing run. See our NAS drive comparison for the full field and how to choose NAS drives for the reasoning.

What does a complete F4-424 build cost?

Every specification page for this unit stops at the enclosure price, which is the smaller half of the purchase. Filling 4 bays is 4 drives at $219.00 to $1,059.99 each, so the table below is the number that should actually decide the purchase. Box cost is the midpoint of the published $400 to $500 band, and drive prices are the verified listing prices from our drive comparison.

Box cost is an estimate from the published price band and the real listing moves, so treat the totals as the shape of the spend rather than a quote. Usable capacity is decimal TB computed for 4 identical drives, and your operating system reports it about 9.05 percent smaller in binary tebibytes. Totals exclude tax, shipping, a UPS and a backup target.

Read the last column. At 16 TB drives the 84 percent of this build that is drives is money you will spend again, because drives fail and get upgraded on a rolling schedule while the chassis does not. That is the argument for choosing the enclosure on the features you will genuinely use and then spending the remaining argument on capacity. The buying order guide works through the allocation, and the cost per terabyte chart shows where the sweet spot sits across the whole field.

How long does a rebuild take on a 4 bay NAS?

Rebuild duration is set by drive size, not by array size. Reconstructing a failed member means writing a whole replacement drive while reading the survivors, so a larger drive means a longer window during which the array is exposed. At a realistic 80 to 150 MB per second, which is what a mechanical array manages while still serving files, a 16 TB member takes 29.6 to 55.6 hours.

Read volume is computed for 4 identical drives under RAID 5. ZFS resilvers only the blocks actually in use, so a half-full pool finishes considerably sooner, while a traditional mdadm rebuild reads every sector regardless. Full detail on the rebuild time chart.

The reason that window matters is correlation. During a rebuild every surviving member is read end to end, and those members are the same age, ran the same hours and frequently came from the same manufacturing run, which is the condition under which a second failure is least independent. Split the drive order across two retailers or two batches, and run double parity once the drives pass roughly 8 to 10 TB. Put your own numbers through the drive failure probability calculator.

Who the TerraMaster F4-424 suits

• Value-focused four-bay buyers who will put the savings into drives.
• People who plan to run TrueNAS or Unraid on it rather than the stock operating system.
• Not for anyone who wants the vendor to hold their hand through setup.

What it costs to leave running

A NAS runs continuously, so the electricity bill is a real part of ownership. Budget roughly 6 to 9 watts per spinning drive at idle plus the enclosure itself, which for 4 drives lands somewhere around 48 watts idle once the drives have spun up. Put your own tariff and drive count into the power draw calculator for an annual cost, and size a battery with the UPS runtime calculator, because an unclean shutdown during a write is one of the few things that can damage an array rather than a drive.

What else does a F4-424 build need?

Three things get left out of almost every plan at this stage, and all three are cheap relative to what has already been committed to drives.

• A UPS with a data cable. A NAS losing power part way through a write is one of the few events that damages an array rather than a drive, and a unit with no USB connection to the server is a delay rather than a protection: it holds the array up and then drops it mid-write anyway. Size the battery on the UPS runtime calculator, and note that you are sizing for a clean shutdown of 10 to 15 minutes rather than for riding out the outage. Picks are on best UPS for a NAS.
• A backup target. Whatever parity this box runs, the array is copy one. Parity rebuilds a failed drive and does nothing about accidental deletion, ransomware, a controller writing corruption to every member, theft or fire, because each of those reaches every drive in the chassis at once. Work out the capacity on the 3-2-1 backup sizing calculator.
• A network that can keep up. 2 x 2.5GbE is the published port configuration here. A gigabit link carries about 113 MB per second and a single 7200 rpm drive already sustains 150 to 260, so if this unit has multi-gigabit ports and your switch does not, you have paid for a link speed you never see. Check the arithmetic on the network throughput calculator.

Related reading

• Cross-vendor RAID capacity calculator, SHR against ZFS against standard RAID for the same drives
• Best NAS hard drives, where the money in this build actually goes
• RAID levels explained in plain language
• NAS against a DIY server, if you are still deciding
• All NAS model specifications