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Every NAS box launching in 2026 wants to tell you it thinks now. TerraMaster’s newest four-bay flagship is no exception – it ships with an operating system built around a natural-language assistant called OpenClaw, and the marketing copy leans hard into the idea that you’ll be chatting with your storage array instead of clicking through menus. The good news is that underneath the AI framing sits a genuinely solid, if familiar, piece of hardware. The F4-425 Pro comes in two flavors: a $799.99 model with Intel’s N350 chip and 16GB of RAM, and the cheaper $699.99 configuration reviewed here, built around the Intel Core i3-N305 with 8GB of RAM. That’s the one worth paying attention to, because it’s the one that makes the most sense for most people buying a NAS in this class.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Positioning
TerraMaster is going after the same buyer as Synology and QNAP always have – people who want a dedicated box for backups, media serving, and the occasional Docker container, without building a full server rack in a closet. The F4-425 Pro replaces last year’s F4-425 Plus, and it lands in a crowded, increasingly competitive middle tier. Ugreen’s DXP4800 GT undercuts it by roughly a hundred dollars while offering 10GbE networking and ECC memory support, and the Minisforum N5 Air one-ups it further with a Ryzen 7 chip, USB4, and a PCIe x16 slot. TerraMaster isn’t trying to out-spec either of those. It’s betting that a proven Intel platform with real Quick Sync transcoding, a friendlier price on the N305 tier, and a much-improved operating system will be enough. For a lot of home users, it is.
Where to buy F4-425 Pro N305
Read also: All-Flash and Powerful Intel Processors: ORICO Launches the CyberData Line of Smart NAS Devices
Design
The chassis is the same two-tone enclosure TerraMaster has been refining across this product line: a black drive-bay face set against a silver metal body, measuring 5.9 by 7.1 by 8.6 inches and weighing 6.4 pounds without drives installed. The four 3.5-inch bays sit behind tool-free trays that click into place, no screwdriver required, which sounds minor until you’ve spent an evening wrangling four screws per drive on a competitor’s box. A single 120mm fan handles cooling from the rear, with adjustable speed profiles in software, and TerraMaster rates idle noise at 20.9 decibels. What actually stands out is how serviceable the whole thing is. Four screws on the bottom panel remove the entire service cover, exposing the RAM slot and all three M.2 slots directly, rather than hiding them behind a separate flap. It’s the kind of design choice that makes upgrading or cleaning out dust a five-minute job instead of a small project.
Features
The headline feature is the hybrid storage layout: four 3.5-inch SATA bays for bulk hard drives, plus three M.2 2280 NVMe slots that can run as their own RAID 5 pool for a fast cache tier. That’s an unusually generous amount of NVMe expansion for the price, even with the slots limited to PCIe 3.0 x1 lanes apiece. Networking comes via dual 5GbE ports with link aggregation and SMB Multichannel support, plus three USB-A and one USB-C port, all rated for 10Gbps. There’s an HDMI port too, but it’s for local system management, not for plugging the NAS into a TV as a media player. On the software side, TOS 7 is a real overhaul – a newer Linux 6.12 kernel, one-click Plex and Nextcloud installs, more capable Docker and virtual machine support, and Time Machine compatibility for Mac users. OpenClaw, the natural-language layer TerraMaster is marketing as a first, handles basic requests fine but doesn’t meaningfully cut down on setup complexity the way the pitch implies. After a few weeks of daily use, TOS 7 holds up as the bigger win here: solid, much-improved software wrapped around an AI story that’s more polish than revolution.
Read also: TerraMaster F4 SSD review: The Palm-Sized NAS That Finally Makes Sense
Specs
The N305 is an eight-core, eight-thread chip that bursts to 3.8GHz, with integrated graphics that handle hardware transcoding for H.264, H.265, MPEG-4, and VC-1 up to 4K at 60 frames per second. This configuration ships with 8GB of DDR5 in a single SO-DIMM slot, upgradable to 32GB, though it’s non-ECC since neither the N305 nor the step-up N350 support error correction. Storage tops out at 30TB per SATA bay and 8TB per M.2 slot, for a claimed maximum of 144TB across all seven drive positions, with support for JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, and TerraMaster’s flexible TRAID format. Power comes from a 90W external brick. Worth noting: like a lot of hardware this year, list pricing crept up partly because of the broader memory-chip shortage squeezing RAM costs industry-wide, which makes the N305 tier’s lower RAM ceiling less of a compromise and more of a reasonable trade-off.
Performance
The N305’s integrated graphics are rated for hardware transcoding of H.264, H.265, MPEG-4, and VC-1 up to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. That rating holds up in practice – running a Plex server across a local network, the box handles five simultaneous 4K-to-1080p transcodes without dropping a frame. On networking, TerraMaster’s own spec sheet lists sequential throughput of up to 1010MB/s with both 5GbE ports bonded together, roughly ten times a standard gigabit connection; connecting directly to another machine over link aggregation lands closer to 800MB/s in practice, still well beyond what a single 5GbE link or four spinning hard drives in a striped array can realistically saturate.
Verdict
The F4-425 Pro N305 doesn’t need the AI framing to justify its price. It’s a well-built, genuinely upgradable four-bay NAS with a capable transcoding chip, an unusual amount of NVMe expansion, and a software platform that’s finally caught up to where it needed to be. Not everyone will love paying $700 before a single drive goes in – a stack of bare external hard drives still undercuts it on raw price per terabyte, if all you want is dumb storage. But for the RAID flexibility, the transcoding, the Docker containers, and a case that opens with four screws and actually stays upgradable down the line, the N305 configuration is the one to buy in this lineup, and it’s hard to come away disappointed.
