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Were you trying to upgrade a VL version?  You can upgrade from VL to VL, or retail to retail (via the Store) but not VL to retail (or retail to VL).  I upgraded from 8.0 VL to 8.1 VL; however, I had to download 8.1 VL separately and mount it to do that upgrade.

 

This would be why mine wasn't working. Thank you!

Hi,

 

Well I have Windows 8 x64 and qualify for the free upgrade to 8.1 but I can't seem to get a good idea of why to upgrade. Of course I want to keep up to date and all my hardware vendors have 8.1 drivers but is this a recommended update from, YOU, the ones I trust the life of my PC with far more than Microsoft?

 

Thanks,

This is a rather small annoyance, but I wanted to see if anyone else knew the answer. Does it take a certain period of time before apps stop displaying as "NEW"? I did a fresh install of Win8 and then downloaded the 8.1 update, which of course meant reinstalling all of my programs. Now they all seem to say "NEW" on them (except Decor8 oddly enough, which was installed last) 

 

Can you turn this completely off? I generally know when I install a new app LOL  :rofl:

 

post-5489-0-81638500-1382202920.jpg

Anyone find IE11 to be significantly slower than IE10? I am typing this on my netbook and IE11 is not keeping up rendering the characters (did reset, no addons, HWA off and on) whereas IE10 had no issues at all.

Does anyone have random connection drops or intermittent connection? I'm using an ethernet connection and from time to time I have to renew the ip and I get a "gateway not available" message, renrewing the ip solves it, but it happens quite often, it happened some times in Windows 8 as well but not as often, I read of people that in 7 they didn't have this issue, is this an OS issue? I'm using the regular Realtek Ethernet plaque

Anyone with a Ralink RT5390 802.11b/g/n Wifi Adapter installed in their notebooks should avoid installing the Windows 8.1 update. Installing the update will result in no wireless connection and there are no known fixes available.

 

I have been spoke to four Microsoft Support reps regarding this problem with the fourth rep actively researching this issue to try and work out if its a problem with the driver or the operating system once 8.1 has been installed. I will update once I spoken to this rep later today.

 

 

Due to the size of the image please click to more

post-149938-0-03087500-1382241087.png

8.1 has been fine so far for me but IE11 is absolute junk IMO. So many websites are crashing on me that never did in IE10 and prior.

If you are having websites randomly locking up and then it says "tab not responding", try uninstalling the ie adblock extension if you are using it, that fixed it for me.  You can also disable "enhanced protected mode" in the advanced preferences which will allow you to keep using adblock without lockups.

Plugged my "experimental" Windows 8 drive in to my PC this morning and began update through the store, it ended badly with a corrupt local user account with "file read/write" error messages. Plugged Windows 7 drive back in. Next tried updating my laptop from the preview to 8.1 using a DVD from my Action Pack. Chose to keep my user files. All seemed fine but all of a sudden a message said "restoring previous version of Windows" and that also failed. I'm done

8.1 has been fine so far for me but IE11 is absolute junk IMO. So many websites are crashing on me that never did in IE10 and prior.

 

 

If you are having websites randomly locking up and then it says "tab not responding", try uninstalling the ie adblock extension if you are using it, that fixed it for me.  You can also disable "enhanced protected mode" in the advanced preferences which will allow you to keep using adblock without lockups.

 

I don't have the Adblock extension installed and I keep getting crashes IE11 too (Modern only - desktop is solid as a rock) . I did have AdBlock installed previously, but uninstalled it in favour of the tracking protection lists. Oddly, the problem seems to go away once I've opened up IE on the desktop.

 

Really wish Microsoft would focus on improving more than just IE's rendering engine now (on the desktop that is). At times it makes me feel like IE6 still lurks underneath.

Wow its crazy how much trouble everyone is having. I went out that night, got wasted, came home, drunkenly clicked the direct link into windows store, it didn't do anything, fell asleep, woke up with 'you will have to re-install your apps again' or something, clicked ok, fell asleep again, woke up to find windows 8.1 installed.

 

Maybe you guys should all try it while drunk.

  • Like 2

Not sure why Windows 8.1 did this though, but have anyone else seen that when you upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1, then your 'Program Files' (Programfiler in Norwegian) folder gets renamed to 'program files' (programfiler in Norwegian)?

 

This is ofc no big deal as it's just a name on a folder. But i'm just wondering if anyone else have seen this.

 

And i'll guess i have to wait a little time to find a Norwegian Windows 8.1 ISO file to download to?

 

I have a legit Windows 8 key, so i basicly can download the WIndows 8.1 ISO file as Windows 8.1 is free for existing Windows 8 users with a legit serial.

As I read all these issues, I think I am very lucky. I had no problems whatsoever with updating from Windows 8 pro to Windows 8.1 pro. Installing the RT update took a bit more time and effort, but it works like a charm.

 

For the driver issues: the manufacturers of the components should be addressed, not Microsoft. The OEM version was provided some months ago, so they had time to update their drivers.

Anyone got any debug tips for the update ?

 

I have been trying for most of the day and I seem to get different error codes.

 

This must be about my 10th time downloading the update. :angry:

 

I tried to install the upgrade from Store since Friday but still getting error 0xC1900101 - 0x2000C until Sunday night. Give up. Getting a pirated 8.1 DVD to do clean install. Thank you MS.

Your fixes for IE11 worked and thank you. However, considering that it's either ride out with no adblock and use the lress-than-reliable lists or keep the extension and let Active X run wild, at that point I might as well just use another browser.

 

Not really all that jazzed about three start buttons on my taskbar when I didn't want any but atleast they're benign.

Your fixes for IE11 worked and thank you. However, considering that it's either ride out with no adblock and use the lress-than-reliable lists or keep the extension and let Active X run wild, at that point I might as well just use another browser.

 

Not really all that jazzed about three start buttons on my taskbar when I didn't want any but atleast they're benign.

I reported the issue to the adblock developer, they are aware of the issue so hopefully there will be a fix.

 

In regards to the protected mode, the "Enhanced Protected Mode" is actually a new feature added in IE11. If you disable that I think you are still running the regular "protected mode" present in win7 and win8.

I think it is just a overload on their servers. I upgraded on the evening of the 17th from RT and it went fine (except that it synced my start screen layout from before I installed the preview) and the fact that it 2 hours.

I quite liked 8.1 but had to revert to Windows 7.

 

After a long period of sticking with 7 and not liking 8 (at all) on Friday I decided to try out 8.1. It looked interesting, stuff like StartIsBack was mature and I was just curious to see how it evolved.

So I created a VHD on my regular Windows 7 SSD to try stuff side by side without messing with partitions, unpacked the install.wim using imagex (all really fast and smooth), used EasyBCD to add the VHD to my bootloader and I was running 8.1. So far so good.

 

First things first, installing drivers and laptop-specific utilities. I was surprised to see everything sort of worked fine. I had to enable compatibility mode to get some things to install but in the end everything installed without error. Intel Graphics worked out of the box once I connected to my WiFi (install seemed to have happened in the background while I was surfing the Intel site to download them) and my nVidia stuff worked too after a download of the latest drivers off the site. Pretty cool. Then I noticed I had no brightness control on nVidia graphics so I reverted to the unsigned hybrid drivers for Windows 7 which worked fine including GPU switching. Messed around with Office 2013 some more, tried StartIsBack, some visual styles and concluded I quite liked it. There weren't many improvements for me with how I use Windows, but in general it wasn't worse than 7 (besides some small pet peeves).

 

So I decided to go for it completely (we get tons of free keys through school anyway). Rebooted into 7, deleted the VHD and made an image of my Windows 7 drive on my second HDD just to make sure. Secure erased the drive, installed 8.1 from a stick and installed the usual hybrid drivers again since they worked.

 

At first everything ran quite well, but a few hours in I suddenly had a BSOD. Rebooted, ten minutes later another (exact same message). Couldn't figure out what caused it from the dumps but since it caused my switchable GPU LEDs to blink I concluded that was the problem. Switched back to the regular non-hybrid Intel and nVidia drivers, worked fine. Figured out that I could use the Charm brightness setting instead of my brightness keys on keyboard and that was fine.

 

Until I had to go to my grandparents and put my laptop in standby. On coming back from standby my display was completely unreadable and full of glitches. Had to start a CMD blindly with "shutdown /s /f /t 1" to get my laptop down without causing more problems. On reboot cleaned the drivers, tried an older version I know worked perfectly on 7, suddenly couldn't get any sort of image anymore, just a few 'noise' lines. So uninstalled the drivers in safe mode and installed the signed Hybrid drivers from Sony since someone online reported to have used them without issues in 8. Those just glitched up everything so I decided to screw it and go back to 7.

 

So yeah, an otherwise OK experience ruined by bad graphics drivers. I have to admit this is a very (very) exotic hardware setup (Intel and nVidia Graphics, first gen Hybrid, no Optimus, hardware switch) but I expected much better compatibility with Windows 7 drivers. Boo.

 

Other small bits that annoyed me more after some longer use (2 days):

  • Control of wireless networks with that slideout metro thing is just annoying. I want to right-click to configure advanced options or get the status but I can't.
  • Dark colors for the desktop VS are unusable thanks to the black title bar text without glow. Fixed with custom VS but still, bad design if you ask me.
  • Spotty performance. There were times when I felt my CPU would not ramp up fast enough and everything felt just unresponsive (which never happens on 7).
  • Can't enter BIOS on regular shutdown/startup because of the new semi-hibernate default boot process (which wasn't actually faster on my PC but hey).
  • Task switchers (Alt+tab and especially winkey+tab) treat the desktop as a complete second-class citizen
  • 8 had a limited Metro control panel but you could do everything in the Desktop one. 8.1 has a better Metro CP but some stuff is still in the Desktop one, but some stuff is now only in the Metro one, which forces you to jump between the two.
  • Font rendering in Metro. Jesus Christ that stuff is just bad. I'll take regular ClearType over that any day.
  • Login screen. Lock screen looks good, but the login is just bland. Plain colour background on a screen with so little content? Stupid designers.
  • SkyDrive shoved in your face with no way to disable/remove it (I seriously hope Europe gets on this since it's just going too far).
  • Folders that used to be libraries and DLNA/network devices now crowding up the Computer "This PC" list/view.
  • New UAC sound.
  • Lack of any sort of faster boot on an already fast machine.
  • Default system DPI and zoom settings (IE) made everything gigantic* and blurry (much bigger than regular 100% on 7)

Things I liked more than 7:

  • Most sounds besides UAC (like the device connection sounds)
  • Native fingerprint management (complete instead of using third-party software)
  • Better automatic driver installation

So yeah. We're getting there and I would probably have stuck with it if it were stable on my hardware just for the sake of being up-to-date, but it's not a complete improvement over 7 for non-touch users yet if you ask me.

I quite liked 8.1 but had to revert to Windows 7.

 

After a long period of sticking with 7 and not liking 8 (at all) on Friday I decided to try out 8.1. It looked interesting, stuff like StartIsBack was mature and I was just curious to see how it evolved.

So I created a VHD on my regular Windows 7 SSD to try stuff side by side without messing with partitions, unpacked the install.wim using imagex (all really fast and smooth), used EasyBCD to add the VHD to my bootloader and I was running 8.1. So far so good.

 

First things first, installing drivers and laptop-specific utilities. I was surprised to see everything sort of worked fine. I had to enable compatibility mode to get some things to install but in the end everything installed without error. Intel Graphics worked out of the box once I connected to my WiFi (install seemed to have happened in the background while I was surfing the Intel site to download them) and my nVidia stuff worked too after a download of the latest drivers off the site. Pretty cool. Then I noticed I had no brightness control on nVidia graphics so I reverted to the unsigned hybrid drivers for Windows 7 which worked fine including GPU switching. Messed around with Office 2013 some more, tried StartIsBack, some visual styles and concluded I quite liked it. There weren't many improvements for me with how I use Windows, but in general it wasn't worse than 7 (besides some small pet peeves).

 

So I decided to go for it completely (we get tons of free keys through school anyway). Rebooted into 7, deleted the VHD and made an image of my Windows 7 drive on my second HDD just to make sure. Secure erased the drive, installed 8.1 from a stick and installed the usual hybrid drivers again since they worked.

 

At first everything ran quite well, but a few hours in I suddenly had a BSOD. Rebooted, ten minutes later another (exact same message). Couldn't figure out what caused it from the dumps but since it caused my switchable GPU LEDs to blink I concluded that was the problem. Switched back to the regular non-hybrid Intel and nVidia drivers, worked fine. Figured out that I could use the Charm brightness setting instead of my brightness keys on keyboard and that was fine.

 

Until I had to go to my grandparents and put my laptop in standby. On coming back from standby my display was completely unreadable and full of glitches. Had to start a CMD blindly with "shutdown /s /f /t 1" to get my laptop down without causing more problems. On reboot cleaned the drivers, tried an older version I know worked perfectly on 7, suddenly couldn't get any sort of image anymore, just a few 'noise' lines. So uninstalled the drivers in safe mode and installed the signed Hybrid drivers from Sony since someone online reported to have used them without issues in 8. Those just glitched up everything so I decided to screw it and go back to 7.

 

So yeah, an otherwise OK experience ruined by bad graphics drivers. I have to admit this is a very (very) exotic hardware setup (Intel and nVidia Graphics, first gen Hybrid, no Optimus, hardware switch) but I expected much better compatibility with Windows 7 drivers. Boo.

 

Other small bits that annoyed me more after some longer use (2 days):

  • Control of wireless networks with that slideout metro thing is just annoying. I want to right-click to configure advanced options or get the status but I can't.
  • Dark colors for the desktop VS are unusable thanks to the black title bar text without glow. Fixed with custom VS but still, bad design if you ask me.
  • Spotty performance. There were times when I felt my CPU would not ramp up fast enough and everything felt just unresponsive (which never happens on 7).
  • Can't enter BIOS on regular shutdown/startup because of the new semi-hibernate default boot process (which wasn't actually faster on my PC but hey).
  • Task switchers (Alt+tab and especially winkey+tab) treat the desktop as a complete second-class citizen
  • 8 had a limited Metro control panel but you could do everything in the Desktop one. 8.1 has a better Metro CP but some stuff is still in the Desktop one, but some stuff is now only in the Metro one, which forces you to jump between the two.
  • Font rendering in Metro. Jesus Christ that stuff is just bad. I'll take regular ClearType over that any day.
  • Login screen. Lock screen looks good, but the login is just bland. Plain colour background on a screen with so little content? Stupid designers.
  • SkyDrive shoved in your face with no way to disable/remove it (I seriously hope Europe gets on this since it's just going too far).
  • Folders that used to be libraries and DLNA/network devices now crowding up the Computer "This PC" list/view.
  • New UAC sound.
  • Lack of any sort of faster boot on an already fast machine.
  • Default system DPI and zoom settings (IE) made everything gigantic* and blurry (much bigger than regular 100% on 7)

Things I liked more than 7:

  • Most sounds besides UAC (like the device connection sounds)
  • Native fingerprint management (complete instead of using third-party software)
  • Better automatic driver installation

So yeah. We're getting there and I would probably have stuck with it if it were stable on my hardware just for the sake of being up-to-date, but it's not a complete improvement over 7 for non-touch users yet if you ask me.

 

You don't have to worry about it... Windows 7 support will last to the year of 2020. You have plenty of time to play on Windows 7. And maybe Windows 9 may be better or you could move to other OS such as Linux or OS X

You don't have to worry about it... Windows 7 support will last to the year of 2020. You have plenty of time to play on Windows 7. And maybe Windows 9 may be better or you could move to other OS such as Linux or OS X

 

True, but not having the latest software really makes my brain itch :P I have to have everything up-to-date and it really annoys me when I can't. For Windows 8/8.1 that's hardware issues, for Office 2013 it's the horrible font rendering that bugs me.

In regards to the protected mode, the "Enhanced Protected Mode" is actually a new feature added in IE11. If you disable that I think you are still running the regular "protected mode" present in win7 and win8.

If that is a case I'll give that a go and see if it fixes my issues with the Modern UI IE11. Desktop IE11 is solid as a rock, but the Modern IE11 is crashing a LOT for me. Just crashed writing this message... Got all add-ons disabled (although they don't even run in the Modern one afaik) and can't think of much else to try. :/

Am I right in thinking that Microsoft only took down the update for windows RT?

 

I ask because I'm not being offered to upgrade to 8.1 pro in the windows store, even though I have the necessary windows update to allow this and I've even tried clearing the store cache.

 

Any ideas?

I got 8.1 successfully updated.  Though I've noticed two issues on it so far.

 

First issue I noticed is the computer would randomly semi freeze. I can still sorta interact with the screen. like bring up the side menu. but opening apps, minimizing, trying to open up task manager doesn't work. I'd have to force shutdown and restart the computer again for the problem to be fixed. This occurs randomly

 

Second issue is windows updates.  It sees 3 important updates available, at the same time when you try to install them it tells you they're not needed. LOL so they're listed as importantbut you don't need them. Kind of confusing. One of them is listed as System Hardware update for Windows 8.1 so I was assuming that update can resolve the issue I'm having. 

 

P.S This issue is happening on the Surface Pro.  I'm not sure if it's related to the RT issue.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
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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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