Thecus TopTower N6850 6-Bay NAS Review

With the system out of the box, along side the size, which isn’t a huge shock to us considering that we have seen this system on show at the likes of CeBIT earlier in the year, the other main thing we note is its weight. Considering there are no drives in this out of the box and the six drives will add another 3kg or so, rest assured this is not going to slide anywhere without a fight. Minor factors aside, lets bask in the style that Thecus have chosen with the TopTower range. Breaking up the matt black paint, we have a simple yet stylish brushed aluminium panel that runs down the left of the system from top to bottom

Above the drive bays Thecus have incorporated a OLED panel that operates in a very similar way to panels that we have seen on their systems previously. The key difference here is that the four buttons below the screen are touch sensitive rather than having a more standard button to navigate through the on-screen menus.

To the left of the screen and between the two brushed aluminium panels, we find the status LEDs for the system itself, the top icon signifies the general system status and below follows a USB status and four LAN activity LEDs for each of the (up-to) four concurrent connections that can be made with the system.

Below all the status LEDs are the four front panel USB ports with two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0.

Finally at the bottom we find the power button which glows a cool white.

The drive trays that Thecus have used here are slightly different to ones have seen them use before and incorporate a push lock/release mechanism to release the drive latch to each tray.

Working our way down the rear of the system, we find two expansion slots, three 3.5mm audio ports for mic, line-in and line-out, two USB 3.0, eSATA, two USB 2.0, dual Gigabit LAN, HDMI and serial. To the left of the I/O is a single 80mm fan to keep the system cool.

Mounted into tray at the bottom of the system for ease of access is a single 400W power supply.

Another new feature that we find on the N6850 is what looks like a set of power terminals. These are infact GPIO terminals and to the end user have no function.

On either side of the rear of the system are two more thumb screws, which when undone, allows the motherboard come out for maintenance.

Expandability and the facility to upgrade is all part of the TopTower range and with two PCI-e x8 lanes, additional NICs such as a 10G ethernet or fibre can be added in for blazing fast connections or a USB 3.0 card for extra connectivity. Compatible NICs are listed on the Thecus website here.

To save having a multitude of SATA cables running through the system, a single mini SAS cable links the motherboard to the drive backplane. There are a further two SATA ports on the motherboard, one which connects to the eSATA port on the rear of the system and the other houses a DOM with the systems OS on.

At stock, the N6850 comes with 2GB of DDR3 memory, and as we can see there are four DIMM slots in total, allowing for an upgrade of up to 8GB of memory.

When we looked at the front of the drive bay area, we noted a removable plate above the hard drive bays and inside on top of the drive cage is a space ready to install a slim optical drive into the system. This is again another feature that we’ve not seen before and one that certainly sets this apart.