Introduction

It's been eight months since we reviewed the TerraMaster F4-425 Plus and the company has now updated its product line with the F4-425 Pro, which is available with a choice of either the Intel Core 3 Processor N350 with 16 GB of RAM as we've reviewed here, or a Core i3-N305 processor pair with 8 GB of RAM, with the latter being US$100 cheaper. The four extra CPU cores come in at a pretty steep increase in extra cost versus last year's F4-425 Plus, although in fairness, the MSRP of that model has also increased by US$80 since we reviewed it. On the surface, the Pro and the Plus models are identical in terms of look and feel, so we'll keep things brief here, but we're still huge fans of TerraMaster's current hardware design.

On the software side of things we'll take a look at TOS 7, which TerraMaster claims offers full native AI, although the user-accessible part appears to be built around OpenClaw. Due to time constraints to get this review out on time, we haven't had a chance to take a really close look at all the new features of TOS 7, but according to TerraMaster they've had hundreds of engineers work on its latest OS for close to a year, and they've optimized over 1000 different features while adding 50 new ones. The biggest under-the-hood change is a move to Linux kernel 6.12 from 6.1, which means a move from a kernel that was released at the end of 2022 to one that was released almost two years later, at the end of 2024. It's a bit of a shame they didn't go with 6.18, as between 6.12 and 6.18, there have been quite a few additions that would make a difference for a NAS OS, but hopefully some of the key features have been backported by TerraMaster. Without any further ado, let's get on with the review.

Specifications