The Exterior

When it comes to looks, the F8 SSD Plus most definitely doesn't look like a NAS at first sight, as it's more reminiscent of a mini PC than a NAS. The main reason for this is the lack of 3.5-inch drive bays, something you'd normally expect to find. The compact size of the F8 SSD Plus is going to a plus for some though, as it takes up very little space, even compared to a fairly compact NAS. Besides the TerraMaster logo on the sides and the model name on the front, there isn't much to look at. The power button and air vents are located on the top of the unit. We do have one complaint here though. Due to its tall and narrow form factor, the F8 SSD Plus is quite wobbly, and the integrated rubber feet don't add side to side stability. A vertical mount would've offered better stability and would've removed the ability to topple over the NAS. Admittedly you can still put it on its side, but since the feet aren't removable, it looks a bit odd.


Ports are located around the back and consist of a single USB Type-C and two USB Type-A ports, all three being 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2, as well as a 10 Gbps Ethernet port, a single HDMI port and a 12 V DC power jack of barrel type. There's also a reset button here, as well as a thumb screw that opens up the housing to give you access to the internals. At the bottom of the unit you'll find a pair of 50 mm fans.

The Interior

As there are no drive bays to speak of, the F8 SSD Plus has to be opened up to access the M.2 slots, this is done by unscrewing a thumb screw on the rear and then sliding the innards of the unit upwards while holding the outer housing. This reveals the motherboard and the eight M.2 slots, of which there are four on each side. You'll also find a SO-DIMM slot here, populated with a single 16 GB DDR5-4800 module. Underneath the SO-DIMM module you'll find a standard CR2032 CMOS battery. Note that due to the thumb screw, there is no way to prevent unauthorized access to the internals of the F8 SSD Plus, as TerraMaster didn't add something like a Kensington lock slot or similar to it.

Under the fairly large heatsink you'll find an Intel Core i3-N305 eight core CPU which clocks up to 3.8 GHz. The Core i3-N305 sports nine PCIe 3.0 lanes, which suggests one lane per M.2 slot, plus one lane for the 10 Gbps AQC113C Ethernet controller from Marvell. However, TerraMaster added an ASMedia ASM2806 PCIe bridge chip to work around this, by giving enough PCIe lanes to the Ethernet controller, but potentially bottlenecking four of the NVMe drives somewhat. However, with the 10 Gbps Ethernet interface being the bottleneck in almost all scenarios where more than one drive is being used in the F8 SSD Plus, this shouldn't be noticeable during use.


Only 2280 drives are supported natively, shorter M.2 drives would require some kind of adapter, despite the fact that the PCB clearly has holes intended for 2260 drive support, but they're filled with solder. If we were to complain about something, it would be the fact that TerraMaster went with screws, rather than some more modern clip-in fastening solution for the M.2 drives. This makes it a lot more fiddly than it has to be to install the drives, although this is more of an issue with the M.2 standard.

That said, where TerraMaster really needs to provide a better solution, is when it comes to the supplied heatsinks. Each heatsink is about 6 mm tall, with the accompanying thermal pads measuring around 0.5 mm thick. The issue here is that TerraMaster only supplies rubber bands to hold the heatsinks in place and you only get the exact count for the amount of drives you can use. In other words, if you damage a rubber band, you're going to have to source some yourself from somewhere. This is not a good solution for attaching the heatsinks, and we'd like to see this improved upon. On the other hand most standard M.2 heatsinks should fit just fine, as there's about 10 mm of clearance available on one side and 17 mm on the other side of the motherboard, but taller SSD heatsinks will obviously not fit.

Other things worthy of note include the internal USB port, which houses a 4 GB USB thumb drive that contains a compressed image of the operating system. There's also a space for a second Ethernet interface, which it seems TerraMaster decided not to include for whatever reason. Finally, there's a Realtek RTS5432 USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) hub, as the Intel SoC appears to be limited to a mere four USB 3.2 ports, suggesting that only a single 10 Gbps port is possible—by combining two flexible 5 Gbps interfaces—hence the 10 Gbps hub, as all three ports around the back are capable of speeds of up to 10 Gbps.

Overall the F8 SSD Plus offers reasonably good hardware, even if it's quite unbalanced, but on the plus side, there's no need to invest in high-performance NVMe drives, as pretty much anything PCIe 3.0 will do to get full performance out of it. Hardware is but one side of a NAS though, so let's take a closer look at the software side of things now.