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"big ugly computer box on the floor"

What?? Who says your router has to be "next" to the modem? And who says it has to be big? Here is a case for 3 nic alix board, its 6.5x6x1 inches -- thats smaller than you 610 ;) (2.6 x 12 x 10 inches)

post-14624-0-40599300-1357054629.png

You clearly have some sort of box "I have my HTPC/Server" That box could be a VM host and pfsense could run in a VM - which just a wire from your modem.. Why you would have your modem in the kitchen is beyond me in the first place.

Your "routers" could be where ever you want them to be - to say they have to be in the kitchen is crazy talk, or that they have to big big boxes?? I run multiple machines, my NAS and my router (pfsense) and its all on a N40L that is only 10.5" x 8.3" x 10.2" -- which is also smaller than your router ;) Just a bit thicker ;) It has 4 drives in it currently and only uses like 55 watts. Have it plugged into my killawatt so lets see has used in the last 6392 hours, 358Kwh -- what is that 266 days, and I pay about 12.5 cents per kwh so your talking 17 cents a day roughly to run my NAS, my router and all my play VMs - ubuntu, centos, freebsd, w7, 2k8, w8, etc. etc..

Your router might be able to do everything you want it to do - but sorry its not up to what I like to do on my network. The gateway/firewall between your network and the public internet has little to do with a wireless network. That you want to combine them into one simple little box with few actual networking features -- happy for you.

But sorry it does not have to be a big box, nor does it have to be a power hungry box, nor does it have to sit next to where your modem is -- in your case the kitchen.

BTW - this thread is from jul/aug 2012 ;)

I have my modem router in the kitchen because where it's place is a nice anonymous place, it's the input point for the house, AND it's the centerpoint of the first floor, meaning form there I get full coverage of the whole house. While I could have it in the HTPC. I'd rather have my internet up and going all the time, even when that one is down for maintenance and updates/upgrades, especially since it's sort of not feeling all to well in general.

And even if a mITX box could be smaller, it wouldn't be as anonymous, it would cost significantly more since I already have this 610 that performs as well as the other box would, the other box still would require the antennas and no MIMO.

I can do everything I need on my home network, it doesn't need to be managed like a corporate network. As it is I could run the 610 as a fileserver, NAS and even a torrent downloader as well, but that stuff is handled by my media center anyway.

and the date of the OP is kinda irrelevant, I don't check the dates of the OP, I reply to posts that pop up in the new content. btw with your box, I would still need an extra switch.

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"I would still need an extra switch."

Says who?? For starters I would move your modem out of your kitchen - you don't have a switch where your other wired devices are located? So no extra from what I can tell.

Glad your happy with your setup - I have no desire to get you to move away from what your happy with. My point of commenting in this thread was your nonsense that pfsense or any other gateway/router distro has to be some big box thing. Which is just not true at all.

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Why would I move my modem out of my kitchen, that's where my main and only phone line hookup is, and as I said, the point where it's mounted is in an anonymous and little visible corner of the kitchen, which also happens to be the center point of the house. moving it would be, inefficient.

Well to compare with my 610, it would have to be a bigger box. Unless you can find me a box that's as small as my 610, with 6 NIC's and 2 wireless transceivers with powerful MIMO antennas.

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DD-WRT has nightly builds right?

I wish the DD-WRT team would just release a "stable" release of SP2. Its about time they do it

No nightlys that I know of, I think you can compile them yourself (maybe / unsure)

Usually about 1 a month lately, sometimes more

There are a load of stable builds, just have to try a few until you find one that your router likes

18777 was very stable for me, as is 20119 I have running atm, haven't flashed this latest build yet

FTP has all the builds, ignore their router database, its out of date

ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/others/eko/BrainSlayer-V24-preSP2/

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"with 6 NIC's"

Well for starters it doesn't have 6 nics, it has a 4 port switch and wan nic.

And we already went over wireless - I would never combine my wireless and gateway/firewall into 1 box. I run AP off my wired for wireless - this is more robust setup... You already stated your running one as just an AP. That is my point.

As to why I wouldn't have my modem in the kitchen -- because its a KITCHEN! that is why ;) Having network gear in your kitchen makes no sense to me. So what if your phone line comes in there. Those are easy enough to move..

As to size the box I already posted is smaller than your router already. And it has 3 nics - internet, lan and other could be use for say your wireless network to isolate it on a vlan vs your normal lan, or dmz segment, whatever. But sure if you want more ports in the same box

Here is one

http://linitx.com/product/12508

6 ports, and still smaller than your current router ;)

Dimensions: 256mm x 158mm x 44mm (10x6.25x1.75) while your router is 2.6 x 12 x 10 inches

**** you can put a full 2.5HDD in there or SSD if you want. My point is your statement that to run a full blown router distro with FULL firewall features and the cpu and ram to actual do stuff does not have to be in some big box these days.

I don't want to argue with you, or have any desire to have you change your setup.. I could give 2 cents what you run, its just your statement that you have to use a lot of power or have some big box, etc.. Just not founded in reality these days.

If you are happy, then I am happy for you. Your network does what you need/want it to do, I have not run a 1 box switch/gateway/firewall/wireless box in years and years and years. You can do some amazing thing with the tiny boxes for sure - with the right firmware of them.. They can be amazing to be sure - but just not up to what I need in my setup.

To be honest I don't see every going back to hardware based router - running it a VM is the cats meow if you ask me. I can bring up other distros in seconds to act as my gateway/firewall - just use the same mac for wan interface connected to my cable modem. And shazam I have a different router as my gateway to the internet. I play with development code of pfsense, if something goes wrong - click I just reboot from a snapshot I took before I made any changes or updated the OS and router is back on line in seconds, etc.

Be we are way off topic here as well - this thread was about ? if dd-wrt project was dead because of OP lack of being able to navigate a website and find the current versions, or the forums of said project that talks about all the stuff in works, etc. As stated already there are very current builds you can use, etc.

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And we already went over wireless - I would never combine my wireless and gateway/firewall into 1 box. I run AP off my wired for wireless - this is more robust setup... You already stated your running one as just an AP. That is my point.

.

Actually that's not your point, since that one is running merely because I got it for free, otherwise I wouldn't be running it at all, it's only real purpose is as a switch and to give me 5 bar coverage in the upstairs bedroom instead of 3 bars :p

As fro DD-Wrt itself, I do run it on the upstairs router because it's a v1 while the downstairs one is V2 and runs tomato. personally I despise DD-WRT, it's slow compared to Tomato doesn't have the awesome Tomato QoS and I just don't like their interface, luckily I don't need to deal with the upstairs one at all after setting it up since it doesn't really do anything, I don't know what version it runs but I'm not going to bother updating it, it does what it does and is rock solid doing it.

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I was using a DDWRT modified kong build from 7/12 on my Linksys E3000 but i decided to hop to Shibby's newest tomato build 1.28.0000 MIPSR2-104 K26 USB Big-VPN

The newest experimental builds of DDWRT certainly have promise, they were in my experience alot faster than the year+ old builds but I couldn't get my wireless N radios to function properly. I swapped to Tomato about a month ago, and I'm staying put until a new version of DDWRT comes out.

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I was using a DDWRT modified kong build from 7/12 on my Linksys E3000 but i decided to hop to Shibby's newest tomato build 1.28.0000 MIPSR2-104 K26 USB Big-VPN

The newest experimental builds of DDWRT certainly have promise, they were in my experience alot faster than the year+ old builds but I couldn't get my wireless N radios to function properly. I swapped to Tomato about a month ago, and I'm staying put until a new version of DDWRT comes out.

A new version was released today

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I saw, what router do you have? Did you try it?

Running it now, I have the Linksys Cisco WRT160NL

The test build released before this one was solid for me too so was a bit dubious to update as everything was fine but so far so good but only 3 hours uptime atm

Seems like a few people are having issues with TL-WR1043ND routers though, losing their WAN port or something, more info here

http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=166624

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is that new version stable?

It has been for the last 3 hours, but couldn't say for a few days yet, most unstable builds will last fine for a few days then lock up or I lose WAN or Wireless

18777, 20119 were 100% stable for me - see how this one does in a week or so

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It has been for the last 3 hours, but couldn't say for a few days yet, most unstable builds will last fine for a few days then lock up or I lose WAN or Wireless

18777, 20119 were 100% stable for me - see how this one does in a week or so

well, i'm running it on a Linksys WRT600N. I'll report in a couple of days to say how it's going. It at least hasn't bricked it.

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"it's only real purpose is as a switch"

Oh no -- your using an extra switch?? What is the world coming too? ;) You mean you have devices that are not all combined into 1 box in your kitchen!

"As fro DD-Wrt itself, I do run it on the upstairs router because it's a v1 while the downstairs one is V2 and runs tomato"

:blink: ??? Did you think of swapping them?? Why do you need to run 3rd party firmware if all it is a switch and couple extra bars..

So you use a firmware you say you despise - but clearly must be better than the native or why would you use it. But then you don't just swap out devices so you can use the firmware you like as your actual gateway/router?? :blink: :blink:

Your reasoning for running 3rdp party firmware vs native - is the same reasoning to why I run pfsense, or any other full blown distro. If the soho off the shelf devices were the get all to end all, then there would be no need to run 3rd party firmware on them, or for some of us to run other linux/bsd based distro's to act as our gateway/firewall etc..

You have you reason why you run 3rd party, and I have my reasons why that is not enough for me and need to run something more.. Your happy with what your doing, I am happy with what I am doing. Enough said.

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I got DD-WRT v24-sp2 setup on my Linksys WRT400N just the way I like it and don't really have any desire to mess with upgrading and returning all my settings.

Some of the other firmwares look appealing. One thing that I utilize a lot is I use OpenDNS for the kiddo devices. With DD-WRT and I can add iptable entries that lock the kiddo devices into always using OpenDNS for DNS lookups and it is a pretty decent setup. They can probably get around it if they learned something and tried but they don't. At the same time, I want all my other devices to use my ISP DNS. DD-WRT handles this requirement well with its feature set. I'm curious how well other custom firmwares would do with it.

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"it's only real purpose is as a switch"

Oh no -- your using an extra switch?? What is the world coming too? ;) You mean you have devices that are not all combined into 1 box in your kitchen!

"As fro DD-Wrt itself, I do run it on the upstairs router because it's a v1 while the downstairs one is V2 and runs tomato"

:blink: ??? Did you think of swapping them?? Why do you need to run 3rd party firmware if all it is a switch and couple extra bars..

So you use a firmware you say you despise - but clearly must be better than the native or why would you use it. But then you don't just swap out devices so you can use the firmware you like as your actual gateway/router?? :blink: :blink:

Your reasoning for running 3rdp party firmware vs native - is the same reasoning to why I run pfsense, or any other full blown distro. If the soho off the shelf devices were the get all to end all, then there would be no need to run 3rd party firmware on them, or for some of us to run other linux/bsd based distro's to act as our gateway/firewall etc..

You have you reason why you run 3rd party, and I have my reasons why that is not enough for me and need to run something more.. Your happy with what your doing, I am happy with what I am doing. Enough said.

Why would I swap them? Why would I run the gateway/router stairs when the mode is downstairs and more central in the house ? And actually I would run the original firmware on the upstairs one, had it allowed me to set up the network like I wanted to, but it doesn't, so.... Tough technically, that was before I laid down the cable and had to use the wireless to bridge the networks, so now I don't actually need to run dd-wrt anymore. But as I said, it's rock solid and stale so I'm to messing with it. But if I had had the cable there for the start,it would never have had dd-wrt.

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As to size the box I already posted is smaller than your router already. And it has 3 nics - internet, lan and other could be use for say your wireless network to isolate it on a vlan vs your normal lan, or dmz segment, whatever. But sure if you want more ports in the same box

My point exactly, after all as you've already stated you don't even need a dedicated box for it anyway using VM on equipment you already have on your network, but after correcting his nonsense statements he then turned to personally attack my grammar, rather than staying to the point. Which is a obvious sign when someone knows they're wrong, or usually the common thing today is to brand someone as a troll.

Either way you can use whatever you want, after all it's your home. My experience from using DD-WRT is a bad one. Their stable releases are years out of date and their newer ones they bring out twice a month are usually buggy as ****. Not to mention the wireless quality is pure crap and that's from using it on two previous Linksys routers and a D-Link. So I've had my fair share of running it.

When I moved to pfSense, man... what a difference. Stable, amazing firewall, unlimited setting to play with and best of all, free. (under statement as DD-WRT is free, but doesn't even compare)

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I got DD-WRT v24-sp2 setup on my Linksys WRT400N just the way I like it and don't really have any desire to mess with upgrading and returning all my settings.

Some of the other firmwares look appealing. One thing that I utilize a lot is I use OpenDNS for the kiddo devices. With DD-WRT and I can add iptable entries that lock the kiddo devices into always using OpenDNS for DNS lookups and it is a pretty decent setup. They can probably get around it if they learned something and tried but they don't. At the same time, I want all my other devices to use my ISP DNS. DD-WRT handles this requirement well with its feature set. I'm curious how well other custom firmwares would do with it.

Just goto administration > backup and save the settings to a file, thats how I upgrade > wipe > restore and all my settings are exactly the same as they were before I wiped

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well firstly, I didn't attack your grammar, I corrected a word you seemed to have issues with since you wrote it wrong twice, in separate posts. and now you know the difference between a hole and the whole thing.

secondly, as was explained before, his solution wouldn't work in my circumstance in any case. neither would yours, but you have still neglected to reply to that post, so.

Also why does a release have to be brand new ? what's wrong a a release that's a few years old when it does the job it's supposed to and does it well.

Just goto administration > backup and save the settings to a file, thats how I upgrade > wipe > restore and all my settings are exactly the same as they were before I wiped

usually when upgrading from the same releases, DD-WRT->DD-WRT, Tomato->Tomato(here you might need to differentiate between builds) you generally don't need to wipe.

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"Why would I swap them? Why would I run the gateway/router stairs when the mode is downstairs and more central in the hous"

You can not be that dense?? Really?? :blink:

Move the BOX that is v2 that can run your tomato firmware you so happy with to you NOC (kitchen).. And place the V1 that runs the dd-wrt that you despise :rolleyes: (but use anyway) where you currently have the AP.

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Before we dive in, you can view the different SKUs released so far since the 2025 series launched for Home and SMB users, with the most important specifications listed along with the MSRP listed below: SKU CPU Cores Memory Link Price F2-425 Intel N5095 4 4 GB DDR4 2.5 GbE x1 $249.99 F4-425 Intel N5095 4 4 GB DDR4 2.5 GbE x1 $369.99 F2-425 Plus Intel Core N150 4 8 GB DDR5 5 GbE x 2 $399.99 F4-425 Plus Intel Core N150 4 16 GB DDR5 5 GbE x 2 $569.99 F4-425 Pro Intel Core N305 8 8 GB DDR5 5 GbE x 2 $699.99 F4-425 Pro Intel Core N350 8 16 GB DDR5 5 GbE x 2 $799.99 The F2 in the product name means two 3.5-inch HDD bays, where F4 is four 2.5-inch bays. First impressions Like with the F8 SSD Plus packaging, the F4-425 Pro is using the upgraded box materials, which certainly look better than a plain cream colored box with TERRAMASTER stamped on the sides. The box gives off a premium feel and certainly adds a positive vibe to first impressions. In the box F4-425 Pro TNAS device Power adapter LAN cable (CAT 6) Quick guide [full online guide] Limited warranty notice Screws (for HDD bays) Stickers 2x rubber feet (spares) Design As has become kind of common with TerraMaster, certainly in the last three years, the 2025 F2- and F4-series have received a makeover that really adds to the premium feel of the NAS. Gone are the plastic shells, now replaced with an aluminum outer shell, with the front and back retaining the textured black plastic we saw on the 2024 models. Some key differences from the 2024 series include placing the power button back on the front, along with the addition of a Type A USB port. It's not much bigger or heavier either; in fact, it weighs 500 grams less than the F4-424 Pro. It's slightly shorter in height and depth (length), but only by a few millimeters. The front and back do retain a similar style to the 2024 series. On the front, you just have your four bays along with LED indicators for the HDDs and power. The welcomed change is having a USB port on the front for quick access, should you need to back up a USB drive, for example. Around the back, from top to bottom, you have a reset pin hole, an HDMI port, two 5 GbE Ethernet ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type A ports with a Type-C port below them, and a connector for the barrel port power source. Again, there's no Kensington Security Slot present, which is a bit of a shame considering it's a data storage device. Left side Right side On the left and right of the F4-425 Plus, it is completely smooth aluminum with a TERRAMASTER logo printed on both sides. On the bottom, there are some holes to assist ventilation. Unlike with the F4-425 Plus, the rubber feet did come unstuck during the teardown, which was also an issue on the 2023 series. It seems like other customers have lodged complaints about them, as TerraMaster now includes two spare rubber feet in the box, in case any of the preinstalled ones are lost; however, this seems more like a papering over the cracks solution rather than actually fixing the issue with better quality rubber stand-offs. There are also four screws that must be removed in order to access the internals. Teardown Upon removing the four screws, you can slide the device out of its shell to reveal the three NVMe M.2 slots (PCIe 3.0 X1) and single SODIMM slot connector, which is populated with a single 16GB DDR5 4800MT/s module. I added a couple of MP44Q M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSDs (2 x 4TB) that can be availed on Amazon for $492.99 that TEAMGROUP supplied us with, along with a 250GB 970 Evo Plus that my colleague Chris White sent me by accident and let me keep a few years ago. As I have said in previous reviews, TerraMaster support staff actually encourage installing whatever you want on their devices, and happily, the USB port for the bootloader is now easily accessible should you want to use it for your own flavor of NAS OS, such as TrueNAS, Unraid, or maybe Xpenology. Yes, because TerraMaster has now switched to a 256 GB NAND Flash card (3rd photo above) for the TOS bootloader. This is also replaceable, but you can also simply add a USB bootloader, access the BIOS, and tell the F4-425 Pro to boot from that instead of the Flash card. Unlike earlier iterations of TerraMaster NAS, you don't have to tear this down any further than the four screws on the outer shell in order to be able to access and manage the memory, NVMe slots, and USB bootloader. However, if you need to access the NAND Flash card or CMOS battery, then eight more screws (four on each side) need to be removed in order to take off the rear panel with the 120mm fan, and then the motherboard can be lifted off and removed from the SATA connector PCB. There's also no risk of threading the screw holes, because the four that hold the shell in place are metal on metal, while the screws that hold the rear panel on do screw into plastic. Either way, like last time when I reviewed the F4-425 plus, I was just happier to see larger screws being used. Overall, it follows some great improvements in build quality from the 2024 series and earlier. Setup BIOS The F4-425 Pro includes an Aptio BIOS from American Megatrends [1, 2], and you can setup pretty much everything here including the boot order, which is locked to the UEFI OS, however above that choice you can enable or disable booting to the USB bootloader so this would still allow you to switch to a USB stick with an alternative bootloader and boot from it, or disable it to instead always start from the first disk with an OS installed on it. Initial Setup Setup is roughly the same as the F4-425 Plus, along with the new TOS 7 setup dialogs, so there will be no surprises here. Upon connecting to the LAN and booting up, the F4-425 Pro can be reached by navigating to http://tnas.local. If that doesn't work, you can use the local address assigned via DHCP, which you can find using the TNAS PC desktop application, which is essentially a TerraMaster NAS finder. The setup process is pretty straightforward, through a wizard, and in full below: TOS 7 Initialization As you can see, TOS 7 received a new coat of paint, and the initialization requires fewer interactions. Happily, TOS no longer decides to throw all disks into the same Storage Pool; 2.5-inch HDDs are allocated into Storage Pool 1. This is because two of the HDDs are allocated to hold system files. Previously (with TOS 5 and 6), if you pre-installed HDDs and SSDs, they were all placed into Storage Pool 1, even if you did not select the SSDs for inclusion during the onboarding. TOS 7 Setup On first boot, there is a tutorial and some steps to take to harden the TNAS (or not), which includes an immediate update from TOS 7.0.0616 to 7.0.0706, of which the changelog screenshot is also included in the above gallery. It must be noted that the Security Advisor still contains (in my opinion) a pretty major bug in that if you enable SPC and then do the required rebooting, the Security Advisor still says that SPC is disabled. TerraMaster provided the following statement about it: It is disappointing that TOS 7 has been in beta since December, and this OOBE issue is still there. Shutdown option has moved Instead of a Taskbar option to manage the NAS, all of these options have been moved to a "Start panel", initially I didn't see it and my contact had to show me how to power off the F4-425 Pro. To logout, reboot or power off you can find those controls at the top right of the Panel. It is also possible to power off through the TNAS mobile app beta. Storage setup Above, you can see the steps I took to create the Storage Pools and Volumes. I made a second Storage Pool using TRAID on two 4TB MP44Q SSDs (which, in this instance, is similar to RAID 5), and finally, I added the 250GB 970 Evo Plus drive as Hyper Cache on Storage Pool 1 in Balanced mode. Registering If you decide not to lock down the F4-425 Pro in Security Isolation Mode (blocking all external connections), then you could set up a TNAS device ID through the Remote Access setting in the Control Panel (which must be unique). This works in combination with an online TerraMaster account. TOS 7 TNAS Online Creating a TerraMaster account and linking the device online activates the warranty when you provide proof of purchase and the serial number, but it also gives you access through the TNAS mobile app, which allows you to complete certain operationsб including powering off and restarting the NAS remotely. A TNAS mobile update is required to gain access through TOS 7, and this is provided on the TerraMaster website, as it is not yet on Google Play. The app is evolving all the time and has made leaps and bounds since I first started reviewing TerraMaster devices almost three years ago. It is not quite there yet if you are comparing the likes of Synology, which, sadly, a lot of users online do all the time. OpenClaw setup One of the main selling points of the new F4-425 Pro is the inclusion of OpenClaw, with TerraMaster claiming that it is "powered by the world's first AI-native TOS 7 OS, supporting local-first smart workflows and independent data control." However, I immediately ran into problems trying to enable OpenClaw. After waiting 20 minutes at the "Enabling" message of the OpenClaw app following installation, I decided to do some searching online and discovered that it couldn't complete the installation process due to SPC being enabled, which is something TOS 7 immediately recommends to be enabled on first boot. SPC for NAS (TOS 7) is basically the same principle as UAC in Windows; it blocks executables from being launched by non-Super Users. After reaching out to my contact about these issues, I received the following response: Anyway, this only became clear when I closed the OpenClaw app screen and clicked on the OpenClaw icon in the taskbar; that is when I saw the message about disabling SPC. I think, due to the fact that this is a requirement, this should be a prompt during the installation process, not when closing the App Market and then trying to launch OpenClaw. There's also no 'Getting started' guide for people like me who have never used OpenClaw. I tried to add an LLM and discovered the tutorial led nowhere. That's when I started looking around the official TerraMaster forums, and I found a guide that helpfully explains that you won't get anywhere with OpenClaw unless you have a paid plan, which is disappointing because I imagined there would be an option to use a local LLM as I do in SubtitleEdit with Whisper-XXL. In addition, with the marketing imagery on the official site, it says that the OpenClaw feature is "all processed 100% locally for absolute privacy." which led me to believe that I could install a local LLM, not one that required paid tokens. In any case, TerraMaster does not provide guidance for this new feature, which was also a selling point of the F4-425 Pro! My contact also provided clarification about the above points I raised with TerraMaster Since it is not in the scope of the review to add paid services, I'll leave that to the people who are more qualified with OpenClaw. F4-425 Pro Surveillance App TOS also comes with a Surveillance app, which is not installed by default; it can be found in the App Market recommended section. In addition, after installing, it doesn't drop a shortcut on the Desktop or top taskbar, but you can "Send to Desktop" from the App Market listing for the app for a quick way to open it. Adding my Reolink POE doorbell camera was painless. TerraMaster doesn't appear to have a repository of preconfigured cameras; instead, the camera must be added using ONVIF or RTSP. No mobile Surveillance app TerraMaster still doesn't have a dedicated Surveillance app, although from searching online, Surveillance can be used and managed through the TNAS mobile app. I tried this with the updated TNAS mobile app beta in combination with TOS 7 and got a message that Surveillance was "Only accessible through web browser," so I reckon this must be limited to the stable versions of TOS 6 and the mobile app. More quirks In addition, whenever I minimized the Live View window in the browser Surveillance app, the feed appeared to switch to the Low-bandwidth stream, and there was no way to get the High-quality stream back. To get the High-quality stream back, I had to close Live View and then reopen it. Benchmarking A pretty cool feature of the TOS 7 is that it allows you to install directly to the NVMe M.2 SSD. In order to do that, you would have to leave out any HDDs during initialization, and even then, the system partitions are always written to two HDDs when they are eventually added. With three NVMe slots, this also gives an interesting scenario where you could build a TRAID storage Pool for installing all your apps and Docker on, and keep the third for SSD cache on the HDD pool. Limitless options! SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within a Windows 11 25H2 PC (image above) connected over a 5 GbE hub was well within acceptable ranges. Although the read result on SATA was a little less than with the F4-425 Plus, for some reason, while writes were generally better. SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 I also ran the NAS Performance tester, which tests the link speed performance. As you can see, it pretty much maxes out the 5GbE connection. Of course, you can also opt to bond the two 5 GbE connections for a bit more umph, but I didn't do that. TOS 7, which, as of testing, is still in Beta, comes with an App Center that has a bunch of handy programs you can install right off the bat, such as Emby, Plex, Docker, as well as in-house Backup and Surveillance solutions. As you can imagine, any media streaming services you would want to host off the F4-425 Pro will work great, thanks to the Intel Core N350 CPU and its 16 GB of DDR5 memory. Accessing from mobile is only possible if Security Isolation Mode is disabled, which can put your NAS at risk from external sources, so there was no way to access it from the TNAS Mobile app. It's also quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past week, and I did wonder if the noise I was accustomed to with NAS devices would annoy me, but all I could hear was a soft whirring of the rear fan (which was a little annoying) when the disks were not actively copying or reading data. Conclusion So what have I learned? Unfortunately, this release raises a few important questions and concerns that I feel haven't been adequately addressed. What I didn't like Our variant shipped with TOS 7 beta, and it's advised not to use it in a production environment. I feel that's a bit limiting on an $800 device. The mobile app is also still in beta and does not support some of the first-party apps, like Surveillance, and it still has quite a few bugs. I am a bit confused about the OpenClaw marketing along with the F4-425 Pro. I feel like that if it's going to be a main selling point, then offer official guidance on how to get started with it. TerraMaster recommends enabling SPC, but then markets the NAS for use with OpenClaw, which requires disabling SPC to be able to use it, opening up genuine security concerns for the NAS; and that's before you get into the security concerns of OpenClaw itself. Of course, the above issues won't be a problem if you decide to install something else on it, or even go back to the stable TOS 6. I wish TerraMaster had just given TOS 7 as opt-in rather than shipping with it. TOS 7 has been available as a preview since December 2025 (so well before my last TerraMaster review), and according to a thread on Reddit where a user shared a screenshot from the TerraMaster Facebook page, it is scheduled to launch today, June 23, but there's nothing about that in the TerraMaster news blog. My contact confirmed over email that TOS 7 exits beta today. The rubber feet also deserve a mention as they continue to be a problem, with them coming unstuck the moment you shift the F4-425 Pro anywhere on your desk. What I liked What it comes down to, though, aside from what I already mentioned, you are still getting a quality, affordable device here, so recommending it will depend on the individual's use case. If you're just looking for a relatively small NAS device to manage virtual machines on, backup your files, and take care of your home theater streaming, then it is a great device that will certainly futureproof you for some time. It provides good performance, takes up little space, and is, on the whole, very quiet. Four bays afford proper redundancy using TRAID or RAID 5, and you can even expand on storage capacity by adding the 2-bay D5, or 4-bay D8 Hybrid DAS over a USB 3.2 (10Gbps) link. Considering the 2024 releases were more about power, with the likes of an Intel Core i5-1235U high-end laptop CPU under the hood, I asked my contact last time if we could expect more of the same in higher-end models and was told: It makes a lot of sense to use Intel's N350 chip inside a NAS; it is more than capable of doing what the F4-425 Pro is intended for, media streaming and backup. The only downside is still the clear lack of community and even staff support on the official forums. In the past, I have had topics go unanswered for days, or there would be generic-type "we've noted this and passed it onto our developer team" type responses. Along with the other things I mentioned, it all ends up costing it a couple of points. If you are comfortable with the command line, Docker, and setting up TrueNAS or Unraid, you'll be fine. You can do great things with this hardware. In TOS, the apps are a bit lacking, and things don't always work as expected.\ AI NAS?! What has become clear to me this year is that we are going to start seeing all kinds of "AI NAS" come to market, and while that might be good for us consumers, be diligent and research these claims. Although the F4-425 Pro technically comes with AI, it is really using a cloud service that is externally sourced off-device through the third party OpenClaw app. My colleague did review a newcomer to the NAS space earlier this year, and it includes a local AI assistant inside the Zettlab D4 NAS, and they do not even use AI in the product name, check out Chris' review here. Where to buy and a discount coupon However, it does not change the fact that this is truly a great entry-level home media-class NAS that you can buy right now. TerraMaster is having a 20% off launch discount, plus you can also still apply our unique 10% off coupon on checkout, which only works on the official website. So here is a breakdown of the pricing that is only valid on the official TerraMaster website. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $575.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $503.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £525.59 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £460.79 Use NEOWIN coupon code during checkout for 10% discount Over on Amazon US and UK, the F4-425 Pro also gets a 20% launch discount, but here, the above 10% coupon cannot be applied. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for $639.99 at Amazon US (was $799.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for $559.99 at Amazon US (was $699.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for £583.99 at Amazon UK (was £729.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for £511.99 at Amazon UK (was £639.99) As an Amazon Associate, when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases.
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