Thecus M3800 review

When we reviewed Thecus' N3200 multi-bay network attached storage box (see MacUser, 12 September, p25), we were very impressed. It was robust, easy to swap drives, worked very well and had support for Raid 5.

Now Thecus has launched a new version, with the ability to playback movies and audio to your TV or home stereo system once you've connected it using the HDMI interface of the back of the case and the included HDMI cable.

In terms of hardware, the M3800 is very similar to the N3200. It features the same metal shell with easy access to the three drive bays from the front, along with an LCD panel, LED indicators and a power button. Inside, the M3800 is driven by an AMD Geode embedded processor and it supports storage capacities of up to 4.5TB. In addition to Raid 5, the M3800 can be configured as Raid 0, Raid 1, or Jbod.

There are a number of connection options: two Gigabit Ethernet ports; an eSata port and one USB 2 socket on both the front and rear of the case. The USB ports allow you to connect additional storage in the form of a USB hard drive, and a wifi adaptor to run the M3800 as a wireless Nas. This is particularly important for a box that's designed to be connected to a television, as it's very unlikely you'll want to run an Ethernet cable between wherever your TV is located and your network router. For that reason, it's worth budgeting ?20 or so for a USB wifi adaptor.

The Thecus M3800 supports a wide range of video formats: the documentation lists WMV9; WMVHD; AVI; MPG; VOB; and MP4 up to a maximum vertical resolution of 1080p.

Supported audio formats include MP3, WMA, AAC, PCM and M4A, so anything you've ripped from CD to your iTunes library can be copied across and played through your home cinema system. However, you won't be able to play Protected AAC files bought from the iTunes Store.

If you don't want to connect the M3800 to your TV or home cinema system, you could use its DLNA compliant media server to stream audio and video to a DLNA compatible media adaptor, or use its iTunes server to play music on a Mac on the network. However, if that's all you want to do, you'd be better off with the N3200.

Setting up the M3800 was quite simple, if a little time-consuming. Removing the drive fascia, attaching the caddies to our hard drives and screwing them into the case was quick enough. And connecting the M3800 to our router, installing the set-up application and using it to locate the drive and configure it, trouble free. But we wanted to build a 1GB Raid 5 array from our three 500GB disks and that took about six hours. That's not necessarily a problem. It was, after all, easy to do, but you do need to be aware that building Raid arrays takes time and plan well ahead.

With our Raid 5 array in place, we could set up users and groups, create folders, and assign access privileges. The M3800 popped up in our Finder sidebar in Leopard, but if you'd rather use AFP to connect in the Finder, it's a simple matter to set it up. It's equally straightforward to set up an FTP server and iTunes and media servers.

However, the reason for buying the M3800 rather than the N3200 is its ability to play media on your TV. Disappointingly, video support is limited to a small number of formats, such as Windows Media Video 9. Although the specification sheet for the M3800 lists H.264, we couldn't get either .m4v or .mp4 H.264 movies to play.

This a real shame, because with a USB wifi adaptor, you could hook the M3800 up to your HDTV using an HDMI cable, and use it as a repository for movies and videos you want to watch on your TV. The included remote control and on-screen display make navigating the content stored on the M3800 easy, though this is a moot point if it doesn't support the format in which your video is encoded.