Thecus N4200 Pro 4-Bay NAS Review

Starting with the design and build of the N4200 Pro, the device is solidly built with no flaws to its quality at all, the it features a clean matt black shell with an easy to use OLED GUI. Installing the drives in to the caddies and then into the bays was very easy with no hassle at all. The drive latches are firm and secure which is something that we are glad is slightly tighter as the last thing you want is for a drive to slip out of place and cause a RAID array for example to fall over. The locks are smooth and once engaged secure the drives in place for added security.

Booting the system up does take its time (~2 mins) but during this it does have to boot the config file, load the network settings, mount the RAID arrays and enable each of the required network services, but any server does take longer than usual and the system does give a clear bleep once done to say that it is done and active on the network. Whilst on the note of the system and software, the management portal is clear and easy to use and if at any stage along the way the user finds them self at a lose end, the help option clearly guides as to what each function does and how it works.

Performance wise I can with out a doubt say that that I was surprised as to how close the N4200 Pro came to the theoretical maximum bandwidth possible on Gigabit LAN. In some tests it fell short by only around 7MB/s. In a scenario where there are multiple users connected to the NAS this factor of utilising this much available bandwidth is critical and for the N4200 Pro is a major selling point.  Across all of our tests in general we can see that the onboard SATA controller is fantastic and gives outstanding results across all the RAID configurations. Naturally what the end user will experience will not match this same performance level one for one but I would imagine that it would be very close to the results that we have seen here.

With the SOHO and SMB NAS market growing, there are a growing number of places where one can be purchased from along with the drives, and retailing at £418.78 for the bare device or £918.82 with the same four Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3TB drives that we use here four our testing, really add the bang for buck value to what can be had. As we have said before, this may be a large cost to justify, but in the long term the economic poay off from using a low powered system like this and along with its auto On/Off function justifies the reason to buy.

Rounding things off, the N4200 Pro from Thecus with out a doubt deserves an award and due to the sheer capability to maximise the network bandwidth where it can and across the board giving an impressive set of speeds, I’m happy to award the Thecus N4200 Pro with our Extreme Performance award.