Best NAS drives for the TerraMaster F2-425 Plus

Best drives for the F2-425 Plus by budget

Three sensible tiers depending on how much capacity and enterprise-grade durability you want per bay.

Which should you pick

Why capacity and reliability matter more than speed here

The F2-425 Plus only has two 3.5in bays, so your RAID choices are Basic, JBOD, RAID0 or RAID1. There is no SHR and no way to add parity across more disks, which means every drive you fit is doing double duty: either holding your only copy of the data or mirroring it exactly. That makes drive quality and capacity per bay the two things worth spending on, not spindle speed or interface bandwidth, since dual 5GbE networking and the N150 CPU will comfortably outpace what two SATA drives can deliver anyway.

With 3 M.2 NVMe slots available, you can put fast cache or even a small NVMe storage pool alongside your two 3.5in bays, which takes pressure off the spinning drives for random I/O and lets you dedicate the HDDs purely to bulk, sequential storage. That is the sensible split for this chassis: NVMe for speed-sensitive tasks, large CMR HDDs for the bulk of your files.

Because TerraMaster keeps this model open to third-party drives, you are not locked into a compatibility list. That means you can shop purely on capacity-per-pound and drive class rather than paying a NAS-branding premium, which is exactly why the value pick above makes sense for many buyers here.

A word on RAID1 with only 2 bays