Thecus N4800 review

This four-disc NAS bears has more in common with your PC than it does with the glorified hard disk enclosures that make up most of the NAS market because of its 2.13GHz third generation Intel Atom processor and 2GB of RAM.

It comes with Acronis True Image and Twonky media server, as well as its own installer, which makes it easy to detect the NAS on your network. Once it has detected the NAS device, you can either open the browser to configure it using the web interface or continue going through the guided setup wizard, which allows you to configure the device’s network address and password. Unlike most setup wizards, it doesn’t take you through the process of formatting the NAS’s installed drives or creating volumes.

You’ll have to do that using the browser interface, which is one of the best around. Once you’ve logged into the admin interface, all you have to do is select the RAID management icon. From this interface, you can create a RAID or JBOD volume using multiple drives. You can also set up one or more as a hot spare. RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 are all available. We carried out our speed tests in RAID 0 and RAID 1 modes. Once you’ve created your RAID volume, you can create a new directory or add one of several existing folders as a network share. Again, you have to do this using Windows’ own tools rather than the installation disc.

A great web interface packed with useful features

As you’d expect from a unit at this price, the N4800 has more features than your average NAS. It’s solidly built, and has a sturdy metal chassis that reminds us of a Shuttle mini PC. The drives screw into individual caddies that can be removed from and inserted in to the drive bays with ease. The front panel bears a helpful range of status lights that clearly show the activity and condition of the drives in each of the four bays. It also has a mono LCD status display that lets you execute a handful of basic features, such as running a USB copy.