Thecus N4310 4-Bay NAS Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

There aren’t that many shops carrying the Thecus N4310 yet, but you can find it at Amazon UK for a listed price of £212.79 at the time of writing. US readers can get the N4310 at NewEgg for £312.96, but it is currently out of stock there. Amazon US to the rescue and they sell it for $320.87, so that isn’t much more than NewEgg would charge. German readers can find it at various retailers starting at €264.83.

Overview

There is no doubt that Thecus has created a winner with the N4310. The 1GHz AMCC SoC brings plenty of performance, reaching speeds up to 110MB/s while the 1GB memory should be enough to have several plugins and services running smoothly at the same time. The specs aren’t overly exciting, but great for the class and it provides very low power consumption.

The operating system takes a more classic approach in the user interface, and I really like it. There are tips and hints everywhere to make sure you know what you’re doing, selecting and clicking. It comes with great features such as download clients, DVD burning, Print servers and much more. You can download more plugins and add-ons from the official repository as well as 3rd party generated plugins by other users. Everything you’ll want from an NAS OS.

Thecus managed to create a 4-bay NAS with a very tiny footprint. It barely takes up more space than the 4 hard drives themselves. The dual PSU support is amazing and something you don’t see other places in the price class. USB 3.0 connectivity allows for faster backup to and from the devices, and you can turn the NAS into a server for USB printers as well.

I did run into a little trouble with the NAS but only due to my large hard drives I have. The 6TB drives created a natural conflict with the EXT4 filesystem limitation of 16TB, preventing me from running some tests with these drives. Luckily I had my trusty old Seagate 2TB drives around and could run a full test with those. There isn’t any problem in itself with the support of these drives, but you should keep the limitation in mind when you purchase drives. If I had 4TB drives, it would have run as smooth as a Ken doll.

Pros:

• Price
• Good performance for a budget device
• Easy setup
• Small footprint
• Native Dual-PSU support
• USB 3.0

Cons:

• 16TB Filesystem limitation prevents RAID 5 setup with 6TB drives

Neutral:

• no eSATA or USB 2.0 ports

“Thecus has created a great NAS with the N4310. It packs plenty of power for any home or small office setup, has plenty of features that go beyond the norm, and does that at a tiny power consumption. When you couple that with the comparable low price to other 4-bay NAS’ – You know that you can’t go wrong with the Thecus N4310.”

Thanks to Thecus for providing us with this review sample.