TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus Review: Eight Bays, Book-Sized, Silent

Updated 2026-08-21 Researched, not tested in person Vendor neutral

Quick answer

Eight SSD bays with individual heat sinks and convection cooling, an eight-core Core i3-N305 and 16GB of DDR5, in a chassis about the size of a paperback. Buy it if you need a NAS that is silent and small enough to sit on a desk. Understand the arithmetic first: filling eight bays with SSDs costs several times what the enclosure does, and eight 4TB SSDs give you less raw capacity than two 24TB hard drives.

An all-SSD eight-bay the size of a paperback, and the cost per terabyte that comes with going all flash.

Best Silent NAS

TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus NAS 8-Bay, Intel Core i3 8-Core, 16GB DDR5

~$900

A palm-sized all-SSD eight-bay NAS with a Core i3-N305 8-core processor, 16GB DDR5, per-bay heat sinks and convection active cooling.

Check price on Amazon

Specifications

Bays	8, SSD
CPU	Intel Core i3-N305, 8 cores and 8 threads, turbo to 3.4 GHz
Memory	16 GB DDR5
Size	TerraMaster describes it as about the size of a paperback book
Cooling	Convection active cooling with heat sinks on each SSD
Noise	SSD storage, described by TerraMaster as whisper quiet
Software	TerraMaster Business Backup Suite including Centralized Backup
Drives	Not included

Specifications above come from TerraMaster's published product information. Treat pricing as approximate, since Amazon pricing moves.

What it does well

Per-bay heat sinks are the detail that matters in an all-SSD chassis. SSDs throttle when hot, and eight of them packed into a small box get hot without a cooling design that anticipates it.
The size is genuinely unusual. Eight bays in a paperback-sized enclosure means the NAS can live on a desk rather than in a cupboard.
Silence. There are no spinning platters and no large fans working against drive heat, which changes where a NAS can be put.
An eight-core N305 is a capable, efficient processor with hardware transcoding, and it idles far lower than a Ryzen or a full Core i5.
Sixteen gigabytes of DDR5 as standard is enough for containers and light virtualisation without an upgrade.

Where it falls short

Cost per terabyte decides whether this makes sense. Eight 4TB SATA SSDs cost several times the price of the enclosure, and they give you 32TB raw, where two 24TB hard drives give you 48TB for less.
SATA SSDs cap at around 550 MB/s each, so this is not the performance monster the all-flash label suggests. The gain is latency and random access, not sequential throughput.
A small chassis with eight drives is a heat management problem however well designed. Give it airflow and do not box it in.
TerraMaster's software is capable and less polished than DSM, and the community is smaller than Synology's or QNAP's.
Consumer SSDs lack power-loss protection, so an unexpected outage during writes carries more risk than most buyers assume. A UPS is not optional here.

What owners report

Owner reports on TerraMaster hardware follow the value pattern: strong specification for the money, software that works and is less refined than the market leaders. Reports specific to the all-SSD models praise the silence and the size, and the sensible ones note that the drives cost more than the box.

The prior question is whether all-flash is the right answer at all. Our NAS HDD versus SSD comparison puts it plainly: hard drives win on cost per terabyte by roughly an order of magnitude, SSDs win on noise, power, latency and physical resilience. If the NAS is going in a living room or a small studio, silence is worth paying for. If it is going in a basement, it is not.

Whatever you fill it with, put it on a UPS. Our UPS versus no UPS comparison and the UPS runtime calculator cover sizing, and an all-SSD array with consumer drives is exactly the case where a clean shutdown matters most.

Who it suits

NAS builds that have to be silent, such as in a bedroom, living room or recording space.
Small desks and shelves where a full eight-bay tower will not go.
Application, virtual machine and database workloads where latency matters more than capacity.

Who should skip it

Bulk media storage, where the cost per terabyte is not defensible.
Anyone expecting all-flash sequential speed from a SATA interface.
Builds without a UPS, given consumer SSDs have no power-loss protection.

Alternatives worth considering

Same CPU, Cheaper Storage

TerraMaster F4-424 Pro NAS 4-Bay, Core i3-N305 8-Core, 32GB DDR5

~$688

The same eight-core N305 with twice the memory in a four-bay chassis that takes 3.5 inch hard drives. Cheaper per terabyte by a wide margin, at the cost of noise and size.

Check price on Amazon

What Goes In It

Samsung 870 EVO 4TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD

~$1,130

Samsung tests the 870 EVO against NAS systems and it saturates SATA. It is also the reason to do the arithmetic first, because one of these costs more than the enclosure.

Check price on Amazon

Not Optional Here

APC UPS 1500VA/900W Pure Sine Wave, BR1500MS2

~$300

Consumer SSDs have no power-loss protection capacitors. A pure sine wave UPS with AVR gives the NAS time to shut down cleanly, which is the difference between an outage and a corrupted pool.

Check price on Amazon

Keep reading

This review draws on published specifications, manufacturer figures and the consensus of verified owner reviews. We have not tested this product ourselves, and we say so rather than implying otherwise. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Frequently asked questions

Is an all-SSD NAS worth it?

It depends entirely on why you want one. For silence, size, low power and latency, yes. For capacity per dollar, no, and it is not close. Hard drives cost roughly a tenth as much per terabyte. Most home servers should be spinning drives, with SSDs used for cache or an application pool.

How fast is an eight-bay SATA SSD array?

Each drive caps at around 550 MB/s at the SATA interface, so the aggregate is limited by the network long before the drives. Over 2.5GbE you will never see the array's ceiling. The real benefit is random access and latency, which makes virtual machines and applications feel immediate.

Do SSDs get hot in a small NAS?

Yes, and they throttle when they do. That is why per-bay heat sinks and a convection cooling design matter in a chassis this size. Give the unit clear airflow on all sides and do not put it inside a closed cabinet.

What NAS should go in a living room?

One with no spinning drives. Hard drive noise and vibration are what make a NAS unwelcome in a room where people are, and no amount of enclosure damping fully solves it. An all-SSD unit is the answer, at a cost per terabyte you have to accept going in.

Does an all-SSD NAS still need a UPS?

More than a spinning one, arguably. Consumer SSDs do not have the power-loss protection capacitors that enterprise drives use, so a sudden outage during writes can leave data in an inconsistent state. A UPS that triggers a clean shutdown is the mitigation.

How we choose: we compare published manufacturer specifications, drive datasheets, published reliability statistics and verified owner reviews. We do not test hardware in person, and we are not tied to any NAS vendor. Capacity and power figures here are researched guidance, not a warranty. RAID protects against drive failure, not against deletion, ransomware, fire or theft, so keep verified backups regardless of what any calculator tells you.

Working out your own cost per usable terabyte? The Home Server Build Planner is the paid version of these pages: 8 printable worksheets you fill in with your own numbers, plus the full PDF, $29.