Patriot SSD 64GB Review

By neufuse
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Grand Master

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Patriot Memory SSD SATA Warp

With the world quickly moving to more efficient devices and higher performance, I felt it was time to try out Solid State Drives (SSD). The world seems to be in a slow transition to Solid State Drives (sometimes known as Solid State Disks; however it?s not actually a disk in the sense we normally perceive a disk). I was looking for a simple, yet effective solution. At this time most drives are still in the $200+ range for a 64GB. I happened to pick up two Patriot Memory SSD Solid State Disks for $179 each, after a $50 rebate on each drive from Newegg.com. The drives are both version 2 drives, which correct some issues that existed in the original Patriot Memory SSD drives. The drives are available in 32/64/and 128 GB models.

The drives I purchased where model number PE64GS25SSDR which are listed as SATA I / II drives. The drive is around the standard 2.5? hard drive size. Their dimensions are listed as 3.9? wide by 2.8? deep and only 0.4? high. The drive only weighs about 3 ounces. A nice feature of the SSD drive is it is certified to be used in RAID arrays, some SSD drive manufactures do not suggest you use their drives in a RAID array due to its writing patterns, however, this drive claims it supports RAID0, 1 and 0+1. The drive is RoHS compliant also. One of the real nice features of SSD drives are the fact they are very resistant to external shock, such as dropping a laptop or using it in a car over a bumpy road. The max shock for this drive is listed at 1500G for 0.5ms. The max vibration resistance is 20G at 10 to 2000 Hz. The Mean time before failure (MTBF) is also listed at 1,500,000 hours or about 171 years.

index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=206028

p><p><a class=post-47883-1223780423_thumb.pngow to format a drive with 512 byte allocation units in vista<[/b]png' alt='b]png'> (This is just one test out of many averaged together)

How to format a drive with 512 byte allocation units in vista

I know it sounds like a duh, just format it answer. The problem is though, if you run setup for windows vista and click format there, it defaults to 4KB with a 1024 block sector offset. SSD drives are created with a physical 512 byte unit. To get the best performance out of them, you should format the drive to match the allocation unit of the drive. For the patriot SSD drives, it is of course 512 bytes. If you need to create, partition your drive and format it in vista setup, before you go into the actual setup you can go into command prompt and do this manuall. When you are on the Windows Setup screen that has the button to go into the main installation wizard, at the bottom there is a system tools / recovery link, most people never notice this link. If you click it, it takes you to system tools, such as memory diagnostics, and command prompt. Launch command prompt. Use the command DISKPART to create your primary partition. You can do that by running DISKPART, then LIST DISK to get a list of drives in your system, type SELECT DISK #, replace number with the drive you want to create a partition on, then type CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY, this will make the partition the whole size of the drive, or HELP CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY for more options you can use. After this you need to assign a drive letter, after selecting the disk, do a list partition to get the partition number then SELECT PARTITION #, after that type ASSIGN LETTER=C to set it to the C: drive for windows. Now we have a partition manually set up, format it! Exit out of diskpart by typing exit. After this type FORMAT C: /FS:NTFS /V:VolumeLableHere /A:512 this will format the c: drive in NTFS with the specified volume label and the 512byte allocation unit size. Now you can exit out of command prompt, you should reboot the computer, as reboot and shutdown are the two options in recovery mode in Vista setup, then proceed to setup the system like normal, be sure not to format or create new partitions in the setup screen for selecting a hard drive to install to! This will erase your 512byte allocation unit you just setup ower Usage Comparision<disk and click next. This should help improve the speed of the drive and use it to its max potential.

Power Usage Comparision

I used a small device called a ?Kill-A-Watt? to compare the power usage of the system running in RAID0 mode with two 7200K RPM hard drives versus the same system running with 2 Patriot memory drives in RAID0. To max out the power usage, I did a full disk wipe (DoD standard) for one hour 4 times each setup then figured out the power consumption averaged. The RAID0 7.2K RPM system used ~49 watts more energy in the time then the Patriot Memory SSD drive setup!. The total power consumption of the system running with SSD was 112 Watts, while when running with standard hard drives in RAID it was almost 167 watts. This was with the drives working at max capacity. There is defiantly a power advantage to SSD, as the drives consume as little as one watt of power per drive on max load. The Patriot memory drive however does not havether drive Information<t as already low power. You cannot shut off the drives completely unless a full system power down occurs.

Other drive Information

Some other things that the drives do not support, Power Management, Acoustic Management (of course), NCQ (Native Command Queuing), they are not firmware upgradable, they do not support HPA?s (Host protected areas) and do not have a write cache. Write cache would be nice because when the drives are under high load, the system does see performance drops. This is something that can be mitigated in standard hard drives with larger write caches onboard. Write caches are usually RAM and much faster than the flash memory or rotational media. In my opinion, SSD makers need to add at least 8MB of roblems Noticed<memory to the device to remove some of the bottle necks that are caused by read and writes while using the system.

Problems Noticed

As I just mentioned in the other information section, there are problems you notice with SSD drives. One of the largest ones is when you are writing to the drives, it can cause system locks for a second or two if the system simultaneously tries to read. This is something that is mitigated by write caches on rotational media, but on current generation SSD drives there is usually no high speed write cache to save money. I have noticed that when installing applications, the time it takes grew about 35% on average. Windows Vista x64 which took about 30 minutes to go from install to first launch desktop on a rotational media RAID0 setup, now took 43 minutes. However, after the installation things did run faster eat and Sound generated vs. standard drives< is significantly larger then x86 versions of vista which install in about 19 minutes)

Heat and Sound generated vs. standard drives

These drives seem to generate virtually no heat. My standard rotational media drives generate a good amount of heat during heavy usage; I have noticed almost no increase in heat from the SSD drives. They after 5 hours of usage, feel cool to the touch.

Sound wise, it feels odd not hearing your computer doing things. It sometimes feels like the system is stopped because of the lack of noise from the SSD. There is no noise at all from the Patriot Media v2 SSD he big issue with some, defragmentation< who love silent systems. If you want rid of noise, I would highly recommend these drives.

The big issue with some, defragmentation

People like to tell you ?do not defragment a SSD drive, in fact disable automatic defrag?, I think this is incorrect. Even with the higher access times, having to read random locations on the media still slows down the drive?s performance. I ran tests on a new vista install and saw that a fragmented SSD drive showed similar slowdowns as you would get on a standard hard drive. The decrease in performance of course is not as great as a standard hard drive, but it still slows down. Upon defragmenting the drives, there was a large improvement in performance. One test I did was to backup 39 GB of information using Acronis TrueImage 11 Home edition. The SSD drive fragmented severely took 28 minutes to back up with maximum compression. The same drive defragmented (using Disonclusion<ssional) only took 19 minutes to backup completely. Both backups where done to external media that can write at about 30MB/ps.

Conclusion

If I was to pick between Standard rotational media and SSD drives from Patriot Media, I?d have a hard choice, the speed is great with SSD, but the lack of write cache causing random slowdowns in the system go get annoying fast. All other factors included I would say the SSD is the way of the future, and hopefully Patriot memory and other SSD creators can improve and fix some of the current issues. I would rate the Patriot Media 64GB SSD v2 an 8.5 out of a possible 10.

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Grand Master

ToneKnee

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If anyone wonders why I tested two 80GB Hard drives, instead of something newer and larger, I was trying to keep the drives as similar as possible and 80GB was the closest I had to 64GB laying around

Very nice review! :)

Just out of curiosity for people who own or know about SSD's, are their models out there with the 'Cache memory' which neufuse advises his drives have? Or are they all the same? As in, no/low high speed cache?

Grand Master

Dessimat0r

Posted
Posted

Nice review, I'm impressed :) As for fragmentation, I think we need the OS and SSD to work together to eliminate it and add other features. I heard that there was a problem where access would slow down around boundaries of banks of memory on the SSD. As far as I can see, this could be eliminated by running a staggered RAID 0 array where one RAID SSD had a starting point of the centerpoint between the start and the next boundary.

Experienced

Skulltrail-old

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? Sequential Reading ? 157.0 MB/ps

? Sequential Writing ? 68.20 MB/ps

? Random 512KB Reading ? 137.90 MB/ps

? Random 512KB Writing ? 35.90 MB/ps

? Random 4KB Reading - 14.71 MB/ps

? Random 4KB Writing ? 1.81 MB/ps

? Average Access time 0.2 ms (barely one fifth of a millisecond!)

??Forth Test ? Two SSD?s in RAID0t ? Two SSD?s in RAID0

This was the same test as the hard drives in RAID0 test. This test was also run with an Intel MATRIX RAID controller with a 128KB strip in RAID0. The volume was formatted with 512 byte allocation units as per the drive?s storage specifications.

? Sequential Reading ? 244.9 MB/ps

? Sequential Writing ? 140.1 MB/ps

? Random 512KB Reading ? 225.5 MB/ps

? Random 512KB Writing ? 76.23 MB/ps

? Random 4KB Reading - 16.26 MB/ps

? Random 4KB Writing ? 2.262 MB/ps

? Average Access time - 0.2 ms

? Burst Rate 134.7 MB/ps

Absolute ownage. I need to get my hands on one of these SSDs ASAP. Surely beats using an 30GB iPod Video (Black/5G) as an external HDD.

I would rate the Patriot Media 64GB SSD v2 an 8.5 out of a possible 10.

I'd rate it a 9/10. The tests was amazingly good; I rate your experiment a 10/10. Great job.

Grand Master

ToneKnee

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Posted
Absolute ownage. I need to get my hands on one of these SSDs ASAP. Surely beats using an 30GB iPod Video (Black/5G) as an external HDD.

I'd rate it a 9/10. The tests was amazingly good; I rate your experiment a 10/10. Great job.

While 9/10 would be a nice score, the slow down issue would do my head in badly to be honest.. :/

Experienced

Skulltrail-old

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While 9/10 would be a nice score, the slow down issue would do my head in badly to be honest.. :/

Point taken, but that would just require a routinely scheduled defragmentation which I do once every two weeks. It wouldn't be a huge problem. Defragmentation is necessary for all HDD, including SSD.

Grand Master

ToneKnee

Posted
Posted
Point taken, but that would just require a routinely scheduled defragmentation which I do once every two weeks. It wouldn't be a huge problem. Defragmentation is necessary for all HDD, including SSD.
Problems Noticed

As I just mentioned in the other information section, there are problems you notice with SSD drives. One of the largest ones is when you are writing to the drives, it can cause system locks for a second or two if the system simultaneously tries to read. This is something that is mitigated by write caches on rotational media, but on current generation SSD drives there is usually no high speed write cache to save money. I have noticed that when installing applications, the time it takes grew about 35% on average. Windows Vista x64 which took about 30 minutes to go from install to first launch desktop on a rotational media RAID0 setup, now took 43 minutes. However, after the installation things did run faster in terms of launch times. (This is Vista x64, which is significantly larger then x86 versions of vista which install in about 19 minutes)

I was more on about this point which I've bolded. I don't know very much about SSD's or if it's just a problem with the low-end SSD's compared to the high-end expensive ones.

Grand Master

neufuse Veteran

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I was more on about this point which I've bolded. I don't know very much about SSD's or if it's just a problem with the low-end SSD's compared to the high-end expensive ones.

Just to point one thing out, I only noticed pauses as long as a second or two when installing software, windows unrelated to the installation would just pause or go to "Not Responding" when interacting with them.. during normal usage this isn't as noticable

Grand Master

ToneKnee

Posted
Posted
Just to point one thing out, I only noticed pauses as long as a second or two when installing software, windows unrelated to the installation would just pause or go to "Not Responding" when interacting with them.. during normal usage this isn't as noticable

Umm, I think I would need to personally use them to make my mind up to be honest. Though, the whole idea of SSD is brilliant, I don't know if I should wait another year or 2 so the prices can come down. Imagine 4 of these in RAID-0? Or 8 of them doing RAID-0+1 or RAID-5? LoL

Grand Master

neufuse Veteran

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Umm, I think I would need to personally use them to make my mind up to be honest. Though, the whole idea of SSD is brilliant, I don't know if I should wait another year or 2 so the prices can come down. Imagine 4 of these in RAID-0? Or 8 of them doing RAID-0+1 or RAID-5? LoL

I actually have my hands on 8 of them right now, and we've been testing them in RAID 1+0, and well, let's just say, it puts our SAN to shame... *LOL* we were getting read speeds as fast as 500 MB/ps but this is on a high end RAID controller with 512MB cache and battery backup, in those tests... thought the people here would be more interested in desktop tests :)

Which I think I should of added to my review.. the fact you can buy dedicated RAID controllers with dedicated RAM for write caching... even with one drive you can still take advantage of this! You can get them as cheap as $99 for one with 128MB of write cache RAM, no batter backup though... good ones will cost you $$$ though

The cheap Intel MATRIX RAID controllers don't have dedicated write cache memory... they are designed for home use only, we solved our speed problem by using a dedicated $99 RAID controller card

Edited by neufuse
Grand Master

ToneKnee

Posted
Posted
I actually have my hands on 8 of them right now, and we've been testing them in RAID 1+0, and well, let's just say, it puts our SAN to shame... *LOL* we were getting read speeds as fast as 500 MB/ps but this is on a high end RAID controller with 512MB cache and battery backup, in those tests... thought the people here would be more interested in desktop tests :)

Which I think I should of added to my review.. the fact you can buy dedicated RAID controllers with dedicated RAM for write caching... even with one drive you can still take advantage of this! You can get them as cheap as $99 for one with 128MB of write cache RAM, no batter backup though... good ones will cost you $$$ though

The cheap Intel MATRIX RAID controllers don't have dedicated write cache memory... they are designed for home use only, we solved our speed problem by using a dedicated $99 RAID controller card

Would be nice to see some real world examples of the speed, like Application installation and so on! :)

Grand Master

neufuse Veteran

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Would be nice to see some real world examples of the speed, like Application installation and so on! :)

I wish I had some more time to do some home use examples, but at work we are testing it with SQLIO (the Microsoft SQL Server I/O Simulator) and it gives a relatively good improvement on our SQL Server performance in the test environment... but this is in the 8 SSD drive RAID 1+0 array, our standard SQL Server array is 14 drives in 1+0 with hot spares of course... so 8 SSD disks are keeping up and out performing 12 RAID 1+0 drives (2 hot spares) but this is of course with a high performance RAID controller... I wish I had Office Bench or some other benchmarking software around to do some real software tests!

Contributor

kilimanjaro

Posted
Posted
Nice review, I'm impressed :) As for fragmentation, I think we need the OS and SSD to work together to eliminate it and add other features.

Apparently the main problem with fragmentation and SSDs is free space fragmentation that causes slower writes. According to teh Google, Diskeeper and Apacer are currently collaborating to optimize SSD performance. It's not entirely clear how the Hyperfast optimization software works (probably proprietary info) but the numbers in the whitepaper seem to indicate that the performance difference is significant. :huh:

http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/HyperFast.pdf

Grand Master

neufuse Veteran

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Apparently the main problem with fragmentation and SSDs is free space fragmentation that causes slower writes. According to teh Google, Diskeeper and Apacer are currently collaborating to optimize SSD performance. It's not entirely clear how the Hyperfast optimization software works (probably proprietary info) but the numbers in the whitepaper seem to indicate that the performance difference is significant. :huh:

http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/HyperFast.pdf

That's exactly what I was seeing, fragmented SSD's slow down write speeds, and have some impact on read speeds also... yet most people that haven't tried it will tell you "you should never need to defrag a SSD" I know I've heard that before, even from experts in the field... yet, in pratice, it just doesnt work... the "access time" being so fast was theoretically supose to compensate for fragmentation, but you still have to jump all over to get to it, just in a different way now (no head move and rotational delays)... in the end, defraging the drive in my tests at least showed a significant improvement in read and write speeds

Grand Master

Ci7

Posted
Posted
That's exactly what I was seeing, fragmented SSD's slow down write speeds, and have some impact on read speeds also... yet most people that haven't tried it will tell you "you should never need to defrag a SSD" I know I've heard that before, even from experts in the field... yet, in pratice, it just doesnt work... the "access time" being so fast was theoretically supose to compensate for fragmentation, but you still have to jump all over to get to it, just in a different way now (no head move and rotational delays)... in the end, defraging the drive in my tests at least showed a significant improvement in read and write speeds

gotta agree

but you wouldnt need to defrag it as much as as a HDD ,not the current gen of SSDs at least

Grand Master

neufuse Veteran

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gotta agree

but you wouldnt need to defrag it as much as as a HDD ,not the current gen of SSDs at least

Yep, I agreee, you dont need to defragment as much, but still a full defrag every month or so would probably help, or have diskeeper do its thing as it sees fit

Community Regular

coolvi

Posted
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Good review!

But regarding the defragmentation issue, Technically, any time you need to jump around and try to read/write data in multiple pieces, despite the type of medium used, there's going to be a slowdown. Heck, that's why there're even RAM defragmenters! I just don't think any manufacturer has officially stated that you don't need to defragment SSD drives. They simply suggest users not to defragment these SSD drives because these are MLC-based flash memory devices which have very limited write cycles (as low as 10,000). Therefore, excessive writing processes will kill the drives faster! SLC-based flash drives don't have this downside as they are as durable as normal HDD's (1+ million write cycles).

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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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