The TerraMaster T6-423 is a solid enclosure and one I was pleasantly surprised by. It's not perfect and could do with some small improvements like the positioning (and separation) of the drive bays, but with six bays, an Intel processor, and 2.5GbE network connections, you cannot go wrong. It's usually priced at $700, which is a pretty good NAS deal, and yet somehow TerraMaster discounted the enclosure to just $560 for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I'm going to show you why you should consider one for a cheeky DIY build with TrueNAS Scale (or Unraid, Open Media Vault).

How to completely transform the TerraMaster T6-423

The TerraMaster T6-423 has some beefy specifications for the price. Not only are there six drive bays, supporting a maximum raw capacity of 144TB, but there's also an Intel Celeron processor, 4GB of preinstalled DDR4-3200 RAM (maximum 32GB), two M.2 slots, and two 2.5GbE ports. It's a capable NAS for running Plex Media Server, a surveillance app, and some other services, as well as storing all your data. With a discounted price of just $560, it's a great buy.

TerraMaster allows for the installation of its own TOS operating system when setting up the T6-423, but if you were to remove the USB drive from its internal port, you could technically install whatever you like on the system. That's precisely what I did. Taking apart the NAS is a straightforward process, involving the removal of just six screws in total. The main PCB can be extracted easily to reveal the aforementioned USB port, as well as the primary RAM DIMM slot.

Taking out this USB drive, I'd keep it inside the T6-423 box, just in case you were to sell the NAS down the line or require it at a later date. This can be replaced by another compact USB drive (and I mean compact) for your chosen OS or you can do what I did and use an M.2 SSD in one of the two available slots for TrueNAS Scale. With that ready to go, I put everything back together and inserted a USB drive with the TrueNAS ISO for installation of the OS.

Booting up the NAS with a monitor connected to the HDMI port (and a keyboard to the second USB port), it was possible to quickly enter BIOS, configure the fan curves (required!), enable booting from the M.2 SSD slots, and select the USB drive for installing TrueNAS. Once that was installed and good to go, a reboot took me to TrueNAS, which then fired up the web UI, so I could configure the system on the desktop PC.

The T6-423 with TrueNAS Scale is a very capable server. Upgrading the 4GB of preinstalled RAM to at least 8GB is strongly advised as TrueNAS Scale requires at least 8GB to work with. This 16GB kit from TeamGroup should work well. Other than that, it will now perform much like a DIY NAS built using discounted PC parts. $560 will now bag you a NAS that can be set up to your liking, runs a custom OS, and has some decent specifications for running a media server and much more.