Thecus N2800 2-Bay NAS Review

Whilst its always a good thing to be looking at the bigger and better products, we do have to take into account that there is always going to be an entry level to the market, hence us testing and looking at the lower end of what’s on offer. The N2800 is ideally suited for first time users, where as said back at the start, they only need a centralised place to store the likes of music, photos and video in a convenient place that is easy to setup and access.

The N2800s slim build and design is obviously down to the fact that there are only two drives to house inside the case, but this also means that it is not as intrusive [or heavy] as some of the larger four-to-six bay options that are available but may be also overkill for the end users needs. The simple LED status screen in this case is more than enough for most first time users who only need to see if there is a connection and activity in a particular area and by also losing the LCD also lowers the cost in the market place.

Performance is everything [naturally] and much to our surprise, the N2800 has performed better than we were expecting. This is not to say that we were expecting poor results, not by a long shot, but when we scale down through the NAS sizes, ie 8/6/4 bay, the results that we achieved were right up there with the likes of a four bay NAS is some areas. File copy to NAS is one of the key areas that we look at for showing the systems performance potential and topping out at an impressive ~130MB/s is a great result to see.

Another area that we have to look forward to is the option to connect the system directly to a HD TV via HDMI and the possibility to stream content directly without the need to go via another computer or device in the process. This functionality will be available by upgrading the firmware to the new OS5.0 that Thecus have now released [at the time of this being published] and be sure to keep an eye out as we endeavour to take a look at the new OS in a separate article at a later stage.

As we know this is designed for the entry level user who doesn’t want to shell out the same amount of cash as one would for the larger systems and with this priced at around £275 without disks or around £475 with the same two Seagate Barracuda 3TB drives like we have used here, there is a lot on offer for the price.

Bottom line, the N2800 offers up a great range of features for the first time user in a simple, compact system that packs an impressive performance punch for a device of its size, and this has truly made it worthy of awarding it our bang for buck award.