TerraMaster F2-220 Encrypted Storage Benchmarks
Encrypting NAS storage is important. NAS units and their drives in homes and small offices are often physically vulnerable to theft. If someone steals your golf clubs, that can be costly. If someone steals your sensitive personal, financial, and medical data, that can be a disaster. We, therefore, run encrypted benchmarks on our NAS units including the TerraMaster F2-220. With this NAS you can only encrypt shares.
Encrypted benchmarks for the TerraMaster F2-210 comes close to the F2-220 but in some cases falls a bit behind.
RAID 1 encryption results fall behind the TerraMaster F2-220 in these benchmarks. One can clearly see the advantage of spending more on a higher-performing unit if that is a goal, especially when it comes to encrypted performance.
The TerraMaster F2-210 falls behind in JBOD mode again.
We wanted to point out here that the TerraMaster F2-221 offers significantly better performance on our encrypted share tests. Sometimes, it is twice as fast. That is a big deal for users. When we have 5% performance deltas, they are not easy to notice. When the performance delta is often 50-150% that is a noticeable delta to most users.
If you just want a local file server vault to back up photos, documents, and media, then the TerraMaster F2-210 offers performance that is fine, especially if you are not using encryption. If you are using this unit for your home-based business or passionate hobby where you are spending hours a week accessing files, we might urge our readers to move up the stack to the F2-221 instead.
Now that we have looked at F2-210 performance results lets continue on with our conclusion.
Final Words
The TerraMaster F2-210 falls into the company’s entry-level 2-bay NAS model line. Users who are looking for a budget 2-bay NAS that do not have relatively lower performance requirements will find the F2-210 useful for what they need. Overall, the Realtek RTD1296 quad-core ARM CPU running at 1.4 GHz lowers costs and power consumption in the F2-210. However, with only 1GB RAM installed and limited encryption performance, we think that many of our readers will spend the extra $100 and get the F2-221 instead.
TerraMaster has bracketed its 2-bay NAS units with three models which are the F2-210 (light use) at $149.99, the F2-220 (medium use) at $199.99, and the F2-221 (heavy use) at $249.99. That cost delta is large. For two drives that means that one spends $75 per drive to get two drives online with the F2-220 but $125 per drive with the F2-221. It is great to have options, but a user would be well-advised to read our three reviews to decide which is best for them.
