Best NAS Drives for the TerraMaster F2-223 (2026)

Best drives for the F2-223

Three sensible picks depending on how much capacity and headroom you want per bay.

Which should you pick

Why these drives suit the F2-223

The F2-223 is a two-bay unit with no SHR, so your RAID options are Basic, JBOD, RAID0 or RAID1. In practice, most people running two drives will either mirror them in RAID1 for safety, or run RAID0 for maximum space with no redundancy. Because you only get two bays, whichever CMR drive you choose should be the largest sensible capacity you can afford per drive, since you cannot spread risk across more disks the way you could on a four or five-bay NAS.

The Celeron N4505 and 4GB of DDR4 (expandable to 32GB) give you enough headroom for hardware-transcoded Plex or Jellyfin streams and everyday file serving over the dual 2.5GbE ports, but this is not a machine built for heavy virtualisation or large multi-user database work. That means the two M.2 NVMe slots are best used as a read cache to speed up random access rather than as a way to squeeze more raw throughput out of the SATA bays, since 2.5GbE already caps sequential throughput well below what any of these drives can sustain individually.

Because TerraMaster's compatibility list for the F2-223 is open to third-party drives, you are not restricted to a narrow validated list the way you might be with some Synology models. That is why enterprise SAS and SATA drives such as the Exos and Ultrastar ranges above are viable options here, not just consumer NAS drives, provided you are comfortable with the higher price per TB some of them carry.

One honest caveat