The Exterior

The TerraMaster F4-424 Max looks identical to most of TerraMaster's recent 4-bay products at first look, as they're based around the same standardized housing. This means that you have four 3.5-inch drive bays around the front, with nothing much on the sides or bottom, all the interesting bits being around the back.


The drive trays are also identical, with the same tool-less design and lack of drive numbering as the previous products we've looked at.


Around the back, things differ a bit from the F4-424, but if we start from the top, the F4-424 Max keeps the power button and the HDMI port in the same location, but the two 10 Gbps ports sit higher up than the two 2.5 Gbps ports of the F4-424. The Max also gets a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-A ports, as well as a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-C port. TerraMaster stuck with a standard 12 V power jack, but the supplied power brick is now a 120 watt unit, rather than the 90 watt one that came with the F4-424. We don't really see a situation where the F4-424 Max will ever get close to utilizing the full 120 watts, but it's good to have some excess capacity, so the unit doesn't run at or close to the limit, increasing lifespan.

The Interior

The motherboard is just as easily accessible in the Max as the F4-424, but props to TerraMaster for the added standard fan header that we hope can be used in case the preinstalled fan fails. It's also clear that this motherboard is also used in models with more drive bays, as it has a second fan connector for TerraMaster's proprietary fans. As you can see, there's no separate fan for the CPU, which is most likely what the standard fan header was added for, but a small fan would have added extra noise. Do note that text for the M.2 slots is technically up-side-down to how the unit should be orientated when in use, which is a bit odd.

As in the previous products we've looked at from TerraMaster, the OS comes preloaded on a USB drive and has to be installed on one of the internal drives, with TOS 6, the M.2 SSDs can be used for the OS. The two 10 Gbps network interfaces come courtesy of a pair of Aquantia/Marvell AQC113C ICs, which should run cooler compared to the older ACQ107—which was the standard 10 Gbps network controller in a lot of older devices—the AQC113 has started to become more popular in more recent hardware. The two networking chips are cooled by a rather small heatsink. The hard drives are once again being split between the Intel CPU and an ASMedia ASM1061 2-port SATA controller.

This time around there's a pair of SO-DIMM slots and the F4-424 Max comes standard with 8 GB of DDR5 memory, which can be expanded to 64 GB. TerraMaster doesn't mention the memory speed and as these are TerraMaster rebranded modules, there's no way to tell from the module itself. SSH-ing in to the command line solved this problem quickly though, it's standard 4800 MT/s memory at 1.1 V, but TerraMaster seems to have decided to mask all the other features you'd want to know, so it might be hard getting a good match without either buying a module from TerraMaster or replacing the existing 8 GB module with a matched pair.


With the F4-424 Max supporting PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSDs, we expected there to be enough space for heatsinks on the SSDs—we tried the 6 mm tall heatsinks that were supplied with the F8 Plus, but sadly this was a no-go. It should be possible to install very thin heatsinks, something we'd like to see supplied with the F4-424 Max. This is after all a $900 NAS, and two little bits of metal can't possibly be too much to ask for here, since it'll be hard to figure out exactly what is needed when sourcing aftermarket heatsinks. We should also point out that only M.2 2280 SSDs are supported—there aren't mounting holes for smaller variants, though they could technically be fitted in a cowboy fashion—but this is unlikely to be a major issue, since 80 mm long 2280 drives are the most common M.2 SSD form factor.