Thecus N4810 4-Bay SMB and Enthusiast NAS Review

Setup: Storage (RAID, iSCSI, Virtual & Real Drives)

Storage Options

I briefly rounded the storage section on the initialization page, but there is quite a bit more to show here. Thecus has a great line-up of features starting with the basic RAID array creation and management.

The colouring makes the selection easy as you can see which drives are in use, which you have chosen, and which are unused.

The RAID mode and file system choice is down to you, and it depends on your personal needs and the available drives. A good setup is a RAID 5 configuration for a fault-tolerance of one drive coupled with BTRFS for snapshots.

You got the options between EXT4, ZFS, and BTRFS as file system and you can encrypt the entire volume too while creating it. Master RAID is needed for your primary volume, should you have more than one, and Quick RAID is highly recommended to check. It will improve the RAID build time significantly.

Drive Details

You also have access to all the drive information within this section. You can view the basic information or the detailed SMART values. You can also run short and long self-tests on the drives.

iSCSI

Whether you want to share your storage pool via traditional shared folders or jump on the iSCSI bandwagon is up to you, you have both options.

You can define the authentication settings, names, and types throughout the creation pages.

Virtual Drives

It is a qualified guess that you’ll want to store some of your optical mediums on your NAS too, with all the storages space it has. Creating backups of disks and saving them as ISO files is a convenient way of storage, but not so much on the access – usually. ThecusOS can mount these ISO files as shared folders, allowing you to use them as mounted drives on your target systems.

Wipe and Clone

Two great bonus features are the disk wipe and disk clone features. The names give the functionality away and I don’t think that I need to explain either in more detail.