TerraMaster rolls out monster 12-bay dual 2.5GbE NAS aimed at enthusiasts

What you need to know: 

• TerraMaster has unveiled a 12-bay NAS called the T12-423. It can store up to 240TB of data, and has 8GB of RAM out of the box. 
• The NAS is powered by Intel's Celeron N5105 and goes up to 2.9GHz. 
• The T12-423 is now on sale in the U.S. and Germany for $1,399, and will debut in other markets in the coming weeks. 

TerraMaster has steadily gained momentum in the NAS category for its focus on affordable enclosures with 2.5 and 10Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. I've used the $600 F5-422 for a while now, and the NAS goes up against the likes of the DiskStation DS1520+ but delivers 10GbE, making it a great alternative. 

With its latest launch, TerraMaster is clearly targeting enthusiast users. The T12-423 is a 12-bay NAS that's powered by a quad-core 2.0GHz Intel Celeron N5105 chipset that goes up to 2.9GHz boost, and it has 8GB of DDR4 memory that can be upgraded to 32GB — there are two SODIMM slots available. 

Each of its 12 drive bays can hold a 20TB hard drive, so you're looking at a maximum of 240TB of storage. You can slot in a standard 3.5-inch drive or a 2.5-inch SSD here, and there are two M.2 slots for SSD caching. 

For connectivity, the T12-423 has dual 2.5GbE interfaces that can be bridged with Link Aggregation, leading to a total bandwidth of 5Gbps. Of course, at that point, the bottleneck is usually the hard drive itself, but TerraMaster is touting transfers of up to 283MB/s with the likes of Seagate's excellent 18TB IronWolf drives. 

You also get two USB 3.0 ports at the back, and an HDMI out. Given the hardware, TerraMaster is positioning the T12-423 for businesses and power users, with the NAS offering built-in tools for backing up data and running virtual machines. 

There's also Docker containerization, and TerraMaster recently rolled out a massive update to its TOS operating system that introduces a modern design and new features. Software was a limitation for TerraMaster in the past, but TOS 5.0 makes the T12-423 that much more interesting, and a contender for one of the best NAS enclosures. 

You can mount the T12-423 vertically or horizontally, and the 12-bay NAS is now up for sale in the U.S. and Germany for $1,399. It will debut in other markets in the coming weeks.