Inside the box

The N2200 comes in a cube box which is nicely decorated with product features, even with this Thecus NAS kind of looking like a bread toaster it should be clear to most people it most certainly is an IT product. The small box makes you aware that this dual 3,5" data carrier is not much greater than the HDD's inside of it, that's a relief for those who want to carry it around I guess, for me this mostly means I can perfectly place it next to my ADSL router, a centralized location for my local area network.



Inside all the basic stuff you need:

N2200 Unit x1

(2.5”+3.5”) HDD Tray x2 (Installed)

Power Adaptor + Power cord x1

QIG (Quick Installation Guide) x1

Install CD x1

Ethernet Cable x1

Screw Kit bag x1

HDD Compatibility list Card x1

Multiple Languages Warranty Card x1



Like mentioned earlier, the Thecus N2200 is rather compact given all the features it supports, it has room for dual 3,5" hard disk drives and somewhere in between those there's the embedded x86 compatible controller hardware. The body is made out of thick brushed aluminium and looks like the first generation Lian-Li products. The top of the N2200 body has small cooling fins while the side panels are slightly rounded given it a kind of performance and clean/slick look. Total dimensions: (w)115mm x (l)210mm x (h)140mm.



A front sight at the N2200 shows us the plastics doors and the front status display, opening these doors reveals sliding HDD trays which makes the data drives hot pluggable and quick to install/replace. Under the status display you'll find a front USB port and a USB copy button, this makes copying/securing USB data very quickly. At the back you'll find a reset button, DC power plug, a gigabit RJ-45 network connector and 3 more USB 2.0 ports. USB port can be used in many different ways: reading UPS status, connecting an USB printer, connecting a webcam, connecting USB storage.

The front display allows you to check the status of the N2200 in just a blink of an eye. Here is a sum up: Power button/led The power button lets you turn on/off the N2200, a solid blue LED shows that the system is ready while a blinking blue LED means that the system is rebuilding. LCD HDD 1 LED: Blinking Yellow: HDD activity HDD 1 LED: Blinking Red: HDD failure HDD 2 LED: Blinking Yellow: HDD activity HDD 2 LED: Blinking Red: HDD failure WAN LED: Blinking green: network activity USB Copy: Blinking Blue: USB Copy activity USB Copy: Blinking Red: USB Copy failure

This is how the mini motherboard looks like:



The mainboard is based upon the Oxford OXE810DSE, onboard we find an integrated ARM926EJ-S processor running at 367MHz. The Advanced RISC Machine processor features a memory management unit and comes with 32kb cache, the Thecus runs on Linux. Furthermore you'll find Winbond W19B320BT 32Mbit single bank CMOS flash memory and Elpida EDE1108AFBG 800MHz DDR2 memory (5-5-5).



Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) is a mayor producer of RISC processors. Starting from a group of roughly 30 person in the UK they were the first to develop a commercial RISC cpu, over the years however they've grown to a company with 1700 employees located in many different nations like the US, Japan and yes even Belgium (however I heard rumors about the Belgian site that it will be closed in 2010). Initially named Acorn Computer Group, the company name ARM first appears back in 1990 when Apple and Acorn join forces to create a new microprocessor standard. Before the end of 2008 ARM had shipped their 10 billionth processor, their main goal is the embedded market in which they hold a large market share, the competition is on though with Intel and AMD investing more and more in low-power solutions.

The ARM926EJ-S processor is a RISC processor based upon the ARMv5TE architecture featuring a 5 stage pipeline and Linux, Windows CE and Symbian OS support. In contrary to Intel's and AMD'x x86 CISC (Complex instruction set computers) processors, the RISC (Reduced instruction set computer) processor comes with a less complex design and a smaller instruction set. RISC processor need more instructions compared to CISC processors but the RISC processor is fast in data execution and thus both designs are roughly same in performance, the less complex design and smaller instruction set makes the RISC processor less power hungry though. Examples of RISC based computers: Sun's UltraSPARC and IBM's PowerPC.