TerraMaster Forum

Question for anyone out there. I have a TM F2-212. I want to swap it out with a TM F4-424 for it's hardware transcoding. Can I take the two drives I have in the 212 and put into the 424 without data loss or do I need to put enough drive space into the 424 and copy everything NAS to NAS. Everything is working fine, I just want to upgrade for the hardware encoding ability.
Thank you,

Both models, F2-212 and F4-424, generally use at least TOS5 and have the same storage structure, but there are system differences (arm and x86).
To put the disks from the F2-212 into the F4-424, you need to reinstall a new TOS for the system partition of the disks, which usually works fine. However, in a few cases you may be prompted to “delete/format” the disks, if this happens please do not proceed to the next step and contact us to help you check and adjust the storage.

Thanks for the reply. I am still saving up for the F4-424 Pro. It has more power than I need, but I am fine with that. I am currently running two 6TB drives in TRAID and I am under 6TB right now of storage so I could set up the new F4-424 with a new 6TB+ drive, move everything to it, and then put in the two existing drives for a total of three 6TB drives in TRAID. The not so old F4-212 will not be used.

Note that if the initial disk of the new TRAID is 6+T, you cannot add a smaller 6T disk to the TRAID.
You can take one more step,after backing up the 6T disk data to 6T+,you can create the two 6T disks as a new TRAID and back up the data again back to the 6T TRAID.Then you can delete the 6T+ TRAID and add the 6T+ to the 6T TRAID.
Or you can directly put the 6T TRAID into F4-424 to install TOS, but you need to stop the operation and contact us to assist you remotely if it prompts “Delete/Format”.

I got the F4-424 Max. I have one M.2 set as the operating system drive, a 2nd 1TB M.2 to be used for cache (not enabled yet until I install more ram). I have one 12TB Ironwolf HD installed. After initializing it, I learned how to use Rsync and was able to transfer from the F2-212 to the F4-424Max. I got everything I wanted copied and the Max is now my Plex server and everything is running as I want it. The Max is able to trans code videos via remote connection with no problems. I just need to bump up the ram to at least 32gig and then I will play with enabling caching and then learn about Docker and other things I can do with it. I'll add additional HDs as time goes, but I have storage space on the F2-212 to backup the F4-424 media files until I can put in a 2nd 12TB HD to at least have mirroring...I am VERY new to the NAS game, but I am learning and the F4-424Max has the potential to do a lot when set up correctly.