Best M.2 NVMe for the TerraMaster F4-424 Pro

Best NVMe picks for the F4-424 Pro

Three sensible tiers depending on whether you want cache, capacity, or headroom.

Which should you pick

Why NVMe matters less here than you'd think

The F4-424 Pro's two M.2 slots are genuinely useful, but the ceiling on how much benefit you get from them is set by the 2.5GbE network ports, not the drives. A single 2.5GbE link tops out at roughly 280MB/s in real-world use, so even a budget Gen3 NVMe drive like the Ediloca 2TB comfortably saturates that link. Spending on a 7300MB/s Gen4 drive only pays off if you use the NVMe pool as genuinely separate fast storage that local apps or Docker containers hit directly, rather than data you are streaming over the LAN.

Where NVMe earns its keep on this box is caching random small-file reads and writes, for example a busy Plex database, Jellyfin metadata, or a handful of active Docker volumes. The i3-N305's 8 cores handle hardware transcoding for Plex and Jellyfin without issue, so pairing that with an NVMe cache removes one of the few remaining bottlenecks, disk latency, when several users hit the library at once. If you are running heavier NAS-native applications with random I/O, an all-flash NVMe pool in RAID1 across both slots is the more honest recommendation than a cache setup.

One honest caveat