Thecus N2200 Review - Your ideal home NAS?

Storage/Other by geoffrey @ 2010-07-07

Network attached RAID 0-1 and JBOD, iTunes server, photo server, media server (uPnP), USB/IP webcam support, ftp/bt/eMule support, hotswap and autorebuild functions, all that you can get in one solution which is easy to use and requires only a minimum of knowledge to set up properly. The Thecus N2200 also comes at a very respectable price, could it be the ideal home NAS? We find out for you, read along.

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Introduction

Living in the age of stupidly low prices for PCs it's no surprise to find multiple of them per household. More people are getting familiar with home networking and network attached peripherals, the ease of having all your data centralized and always accessible has brought us home grade network attached storage (NAS) devices and more and more do we find this kind of external storage taking place in non-industry/office environments. NAS will keep on charming more people in the near future without doubt and so this [M]reviewer found it was about time to upgrade his own external data storage device.

Thecus to the rescue

Madshrimps (c)


Founded in 2004 Thecus is a relatively new player in pc consumer market, though they speak of decades of R&D experience. How's that? Well Thecus was originally part of the hardware department from Abit Computer for several years. At the time Abit saw the immature but yet huge market for storage and spent resource to develop storage products. In 2004 Edwin Lin, general manager of the Abit R&D team, took one step further and founded Thecus Technology Corp. and became an independent organization dedicated 100% to storage. So taking account of the development period, Thecus had been doing storage for almost 10 years. Their first successful project was the first ever 4 bay NAS with Intel’s IOP in 2005. In 2007, they introduced the 1st 5 bay NAS (with Intel Celeron) and also the 1st NAS with iSCSI. They established solid relationship with Intel since and opened up the storage market for Intel. The picture below represents the current product line starting from consumer 2 bay (2 HDDs) NAS up to enterprise 8 bays (2U rack mount) NAS. They also have 3 pure iSCSI products for high-end enterprise applications.

Madshrimps (c)


Today we'll be looking at the N2200, an advanced NAS for home entertainment:

Madshrimps (c)


Features:
  • Status At-a-Glance: front LCD displaying the status
  • Easy to Set Up, Easy to Use: AJAX web based interaface and one-click USB disk backup, backup and synchronizing software
  • Enterprise-Class Data Protection At Home: RAID 0, 1, and JBOD, auto-rebuild, hot swapping
  • Rich and Friendly Multimedia Features: iTunes server, photo web server, media server (DLNA/uPnP compatiable), http, FTP, BT, and eMule download, USB/IP webcam
  • Quietly Saving Money: as low as 11W, near noiseless

    While the main goal is securing data, the extra features makes live just a tad easier, for instance the USB quick copy feature, while other features are just very useful to have included in this package (security cam for example). The merrier the options, the more people will feel related to this product...
    Quanta costa? € 159, for that price you can't build your own home server, but does this mean it is worth the asking price? I took my time to experiment and check out all the possibilities, features and performance of the N2200 to see if it is justified to spend this amount of money for a product which on its own doesn't do really more then 'keeping data secure' and ‘accessible’.
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