Installing Unraid on a Terramaster F4-424
I recently bought a Terramaster F4-424 NAS for my home network. It’s quite a neat box and reasonably priced.
The reason why I chose this device over say, a Synology, is the fact that you can easily replace the operating system. I wasn’t keen on Terramaster’s provided software and wanted to try out Unraid instead.
Replacing the operating system is really just a matter of swapping a tiny bootable USB drive with another.
There are guides on this on YouTube that go pretty in-depth into what is a fairly simple process, but they’re mostly for one of the previous models, not the F4-424.
I just want to document some of the differences I encountered in the F4-424 compared to the above video and other guides you might find online.
Replacing the USB boot drive
The USB drive to replace is at the bottom, mounted at the edge of the motherboard.
There is not enough room between the top of the drive and the metal casing to be able to pull the drive out of the socket (contrary to the previous model)
So that means we need to lift the motherboard to get it out. Luckily it’s just a simple case of removing 4 screws
Then you just need to gently lift the motherboard up, it might be a bit tight because the board is connected to a daughter board via a PCI-E slot (I presume) but some light wiggling should get it out.
With the motherboard lifted, you can swap the USB drives and then it’s just a matter of reassembling everything back together.
Keyboard and mouse?
Some of the guides talk about plugging in HDMI, keyboard and mouse etc to configure the BIOS to boot from the right drive. In my experience I plugged a HDMI cable in and turned the device on and it automatically booted into Unraid anyway, so no further configuration required.
Hope this guide helps!