Turning the TerraMaster F4-424 Pro Hardware Into an Unraid NAS: Not Living With the Cards Dealt by the Vendor

When I bought the TerraMaster F4-424 Pro, I bought it with the promise of TerraMaster’s upcoming 6.0 software. On paper, the hardware looked like a great little NAS: a modern Intel processor, plenty of memory, four drive bays, two NVMe slots, dual 2.5GbE networking, and enough horsepower for media serving and general homelab duties. The hardware was exactly the kind of compact, capable box I wanted.

The software, however, was another story.

To be fair, I did try some of the TerraMaster 6.0 beta releases. I also want to be clear that beta software is beta software. It should not be trusted with important data unless you are fully prepared for things to break. That said, TerraMaster’s beta process and the experience I had with the software did not inspire confidence for my use case. I am not a fan of how they handle betas, and while I understand that unfinished software is expected to have problems, I did not want my storage platform depending on something I did not fully trust.

That led me to a simple conclusion: I did not have to live with the cards dealt by the vendor.

The TerraMaster hardware was good. I just needed a different operating system.

The Hardware: TerraMaster F4-424 Pro

The TerraMaster F4-424 Pro is a strong hardware platform for a small NAS or homelab server. The key specifications are:

For a small box, that is a lot of capability. The Intel i3-N305 is especially interesting because it gives you eight efficient cores and integrated Intel graphics that can help with media workloads like Plex transcoding. Since it is Intel hardware, hardware transcoding support is straightforward and well supported in the software stack I am using.

The two NVMe slots also make the system more flexible than a traditional four-bay NAS. In my setup, I did not want to waste those slots on an operating system install. I wanted to use them for storage performance. One NVMe slot is used for ZFS cache, while the other is used for ZFS logs. That lets the internal flash storage support the storage workload instead of being consumed by the boot device.

The question was not whether the hardware was useful. The question was what software should run on it.

Considering TrueNAS

My first thought was TrueNAS. It is a well-known storage platform, especially for ZFS. It is powerful, mature, and popular among homelab users. For many people, TrueNAS is a great choice.

But for this particular device, I ran into a practical issue: boot drive placement.

TrueNAS generally expects to be installed to a local boot device. It is not especially friendly toward running from a USB boot drive in the same way that Unraid is. On a larger server, that might not matter. You might have extra SATA ports, mirrored boot SSDs, or a dedicated internal drive just for the operating system.

On the TerraMaster F4-424 Pro, the layout changes the decision. The system gives you four SATA drive bays and two NVMe slots. If I used TrueNAS, I would likely need to dedicate one of those NVMe slots as the OS install drive. That would work, but I did not want to give up an NVMe slot for the operating system. I wanted to use the two NVMe slots for ZFS cache and ZFS logs.

That became the deciding factor.

TrueNAS is excellent if you are building around its assumptions. But on this TerraMaster hardware, I wanted something that could boot cleanly from USB and leave my internal storage available for data, cache, and logs.

That pushed me toward Unraid.

Moving to Unraid

Unraid was a better fit for how I wanted to use the F4-424 Pro hardware. It is designed around booting from a USB flash drive, which means the four SATA bays and two NVMe slots can remain available for storage. That made much more sense for this compact NAS.

I bought a Samsung Fit 64 GB USB drive and removed the plastic casing. Once the case was off, the drive fit perfectly into the internal USB port on the TerraMaster motherboard. That gave me a clean internal boot solution without needing to sacrifice an NVMe slot or leave a USB drive sticking out of the back of the NAS.

From there, I installed Unraid 6 and started using ZFS, which at the time was a newer feature in Unraid. Once the system was up and running, I was off to the races.

One of my early concerns was cooling. With vendor NAS hardware, fan behavior can be one of the biggest question marks when you install a non-vendor operating system. You may get the storage working, the network working, and the apps working, but if fan control is broken or unreliable, the whole setup becomes questionable.

Fortunately, that concern was solved with plugins. I added fan control support using:

• Dynamix Auto Fan Control
• ITE IT87 Driver

With those installed, I was able to control the cooling properly. That was one of the things that worried me most in the beginning, and once it was handled, the TerraMaster became much easier to trust as an Unraid system.

Why Unraid Made Sense

For this setup, Unraid gave me several advantages.

First, the USB boot model matched the hardware very well. I did not have to waste an NVMe slot on the operating system. The configuration lives on the USB drive, and Unraid also offers cloud backup for the configuration. That means if the USB drive ever fails, rebuilding a new boot drive is not a major project. You can create a new USB, restore the configuration, and get back up and running.

That is one of the big differences compared with a traditional local-install NAS operating system. With TrueNAS, the boot device is part of the installation design. With Unraid, the USB drive is part of the identity and configuration model. For a small NAS with limited internal drive locations, that difference matters.

Second, Unraid allowed the TerraMaster hardware to be used more efficiently. The four drive bays could remain focused on the main storage pool, while the two NVMe slots could be split between ZFS cache and ZFS logs. I did not have to compromise the storage layout just to satisfy the OS install requirements.

Third, Unraid’s flexibility made it easy to grow into the system. I started with the storage side, then later expanded how much I was running directly on the device.

Fourth, Unraid’s plugin and community ecosystem helped solve the hardware-specific issue that concerned me most: fan control. The combination of the ITE IT87 Driver and Dynamix Auto Fan Control turned the TerraMaster into a much more practical platform.

And finally, Unraid continues to evolve. It has historically been associated with USB booting, but newer support for non-USB installs is also developing. That gives users more options going forward while still preserving the USB-based approach that made it attractive for hardware like this.

Moving Plex Onto the TerraMaster

One of the biggest changes I made over time was moving Plex to run locally on the TerraMaster itself.

Before that, I had Plex running as a virtual machine on Proxmox. The media lived on the TerraMaster, and Plex accessed it through an NFS mount. That worked, but it added extra moving parts. Plex was running on one system, the storage was on another, and the whole setup depended on the network path between them.

Moving Plex directly onto the TerraMaster simplified the setup. Since the TerraMaster already housed all of the Plex data, it made sense to run the Plex server there as well. That removed the need for the Proxmox VM and the NFS mount just to connect Plex to its own media library.

It also let me use the local Intel GPU for transcoding. The i3-N305 has integrated Intel graphics, and hardware transcoding has been working great. Because it is Intel, support is straightforward and does not require fighting with unusual hardware compatibility problems. I also have plenty of hardware available in the NAS for this workload, so running Plex locally has been a good fit.

This was one of those changes that made the system feel cleaner. Fewer systems involved, fewer network dependencies, and better use of the hardware already sitting inside the TerraMaster.

More Than a Year Later

Fast forward more than a year, and the system is still running well. I am now on Unraid version 7.3.1, and the TerraMaster hardware has become a reliable part of my homelab.

The move to Unraid turned the F4-424 Pro into more than just a vendor NAS. It became a flexible storage and application platform. It handles the NAS role, supports ZFS, gives me control over the cooling, and now runs Plex locally with working Intel hardware transcoding.

At this point, everything is running great.

Watching TerraMaster OS 7 From the Sidelines

TerraMaster is now coming out with version 7 of its operating system, and I still have the original TerraMaster USB drive. I may update that USB separately, remove my current drives, and use some old drives temporarily just to see what has changed.

That approach matters because I do not want to risk corrupting data by attaching the same drives to a different operating system. If I test TerraMaster OS 7, I want to do it safely, with drives I do not care about, and without putting my current Unraid storage at risk.

I am also curious whether there might be a BIOS update or other firmware-related improvements worth checking.

But I am not in a hurry.

That is the benefit of moving to a platform that works for my needs. I am no longer waiting on the vendor’s software roadmap to make the hardware useful. TerraMaster may improve its OS, and I hope it does. Competition is good, and better NAS software helps everyone. But for my own system, Unraid already gave me the control and stability I wanted.

Final Thoughts

The TerraMaster F4-424 Pro is good hardware. The Intel i3-N305, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, four SATA bays, two NVMe slots, dual 2.5GbE networking, and hardware transcoding support make it a very capable small NAS.

But hardware is only half the story.

The original promise of TerraMaster’s 6.0 software did not work out for me, and the beta experience did not give me enough confidence to trust it with my data. Instead of accepting that limitation, I looked at my options. TrueNAS was tempting, especially because of ZFS, but its need for a local install drive made it less appealing on this specific hardware. I did not want to give up an NVMe slot just to boot the OS.

Unraid ended up being the better fit. It allowed me to boot from an internal USB drive, keep my NVMe slots available for ZFS cache and ZFS logs, use ZFS, control the fans with plugins, and eventually run Plex directly on the box with Intel hardware transcoding.

More than a year later, that decision still feels right.

The lesson is simple: when you buy a NAS, you are not always locked into the vendor’s software. If the hardware is capable and the community has done the work, you may have better options. In my case, moving the TerraMaster F4-424 Pro hardware to Unraid turned it from a box with software concerns into a reliable, flexible homelab NAS.