Installation & troubleshooting

Although Thecus claims it setup is quick and easy it took me few hours to get it all working properly. Installing the hard drives goes very quick: the drive holder slides in and out and the hard drive is tightened to the drive holder with 4 screws. With that you only have to connect to UTP cable and power adapter and in under 5 minutes you have the device ready for configuring. This did not go as good as it was suppose to be though, with everything set up correctly the N2200 refused to boot. We noticed the AC adapter power led was illuminated and few minutes later measuring and testing around I noticed how the DC power connector which plugs at the back of the N2200 was having some kind of bad contact.

Lucky me I'm a handy guy, I had another power plug laying around so I replaced it with the original é voila, I was good to go. I booted up my portable and inserted the Thecus software cd-rom, few clicks later the Smart Utility tool was installed, though when trying to set-up the N2200 I received the message that the device type is newer than the software version. So the added cd-rom is too outdated for the N2200? Yes, I paid a visit to the Thecus website and noticed software version 1.00.12 was available where the cd-rom version was 1.00.10. I also noticed a new firmware version, before continuing I thought to myself it wouldn't be a bad idea to upgrade to this new firmware version, I don't want to find out more problems later on when everything has been set up.

I downloaded and flashed firmware version v3.00.08, original firmware: v3.00.07E. Open the web interface and look under System Management->Firmware upgrade. It takes few minutes, it's not as fast as upgrading a motherboard bios, just have some patience here. I suggest our readers to do the same thing, leave the cd-rom for what it is and go straight forward to the Support page on the Thecus website.


hard disc drives are tightened with 4 mounting screws onto a metallic slider making them easy accessible and hot pluggable.

So how is the Thecus Smart Utility? Well during setup is nicely ask you if you want to add it to system boot, after that it auto searches for any Thecus network connected device, if your firewall isn't configured correctly yet then adjust its configuration and rescan. Next you get to choose the installation mode, you can choose between 'quick' or 'manual', to see how quick 'quick' is I went for the first option, the tool then starts configuring the N2200, you may notice the front displaying now doing all kind of stuff and few minutes later the configuration tool is near complete, a new Windows 7 windows pops upon with displaying the content of the N2200 network location.

In the Smart Utility you now get to choose between 'set backup task' and 'start browser', or you can just exit. I wanted to check it the browser configuring app so I took the 2nd option here, a new webbrowser tab popped open with the Thecus’ ip address in its address bar. You get three login tabs: Login, Web Disk and Photo server. Hmm, login details... there are none inside the quick setup guide so back to searching the cd-rom, I preferred paying another visit to the Thecus website and found out the default login is: admin and password: admin.