Thecus N4100 NAS Review
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NAS devices purport to be small, easy to set up, and reliable little appliances, but are they in the real world? We took a close look at one and the short answer is yes, but with a few minor caveats.

The Physical Side
The Thecus N4100 is the larger sibling of the N2100, and is quite a bit more sophisticated. The main differences are RAID-5 in addition to the 0 and 1 of the 2100, hot plugging of drives, and of course 4 instead of two bays.

The unit itself is quite compact, barely bigger than the four hot plug drive enclosures in the front, and not much bigger in the other dimensions. You could fit two of them in an average shoe box.

The back is quite plain. A large 120mm fan grate takes up the top 3/4 of the unit, the bottom has two gigabit ethernet ports, a standard power in, and a smaller fan grate. If you undo the three thumb screws, it pulls off the backplane that the SATA drives plug directly in to, along with what amounts to the motherboard of the unit.

The motherboard is leaning up against the back of the unit, The onboard memory is 256MB of DDR-400 by Kingmax. The unit only supports 256MB, if you plug more in, it will not make use of it. There is also a SO-DIMM looking slot, possibly mini-PCI, used for the optional wireless adapter on the left near the bottom.

The CPU is an Intel ARM processor, and there is an Intel flash chip right below that. Several other Intel chips are scattered all over the board, with hardly anything of note sourced elsewhere, even the Ethernet chips are Intel 82541’s.

The backplane on the right is basically a board to route power to the drives, signals to the mobo, and provide a physical connection to the cages. On the bottom of the backplane, on the right, there are four sets of SATA power and signal connectors, one for each unit, and the top has a large connector that the mobo slides in to.

Putting the drives in the cages is quite easy, four screws on the bottom of the hot plug carrier is about all you need. Other than that, the entire thing is tool-free. The carriers slide in, snap into place with a clip, and there is an individual key lock on each drive, a nice touch, but one for all four would work just as well.

The outside of the unit is very well done, clean, compact and almost entirely tool-free. Each drive carrier has individual power and activity LEDs, and the front of the unit has ample status indicators. There are power, busy, LAN1, LAN2 and error lights, all except the ‘busy’ have fairly intuitive pictographs beside them. The power button has a large PC power symbol on it, but the much smaller reset button has a rather cryptic triangle symbol. Either way, anyone with a vague familiarity with computers can figure it out in no time without a manual.

 

Setup and Network Configuration
So, how does it work? Very well. I am writing this from the perspective of someone with a clue about setting up networks, this is a SOHO or small business device, so if you don’t have the skills to set up a rudimentary server, you probably should not be setting up a NAS box to go with it. With that in mind, getting the N4100 up and configured was a piece of cake for me, the only thing I needed to look at the manual for was the default IP and default password. If you can config a PC’s IP and know what raid level you want, you should be able to set it up with ease too.

As was stated in the review of the N2100, the unit defaults to an IP of 192.168.1.100, something that may or may not make your life easy. If you are not on the 192.168.1.x subnet, you will have to change you IP, log in to the N4100’s web server and change the IP to where you want it to go. Several other appliances and printers have a front mounted LCD and buttons where you can set the initial IP, and then log in. This would be welcome on the NAS box, but would also add to the cost. Overall, it is only a slight inconvenience, and probably not worth the money to add a status panel.

Once the IP is set, you simply log on to the box with a web browser. One problem is that the connection is not secure by default, something that should be the norm, in this day and age, a net based storage system should not allow sending of passwords in the clear. You can turn off unsecured data access, but not unsecured administration, any decent admin should know better, but forcing the issue never hurts.

The Menus
Once in, the management is pretty straightforward. There are six menus, Status, Storage, Network, Accounts, System and Language. Every task and sub-menu is where you think it should be, pretty logically laid out with no hidden ‘gotchas’ or horribly quirky thinks hidden where you would least expect them. There is a lot of duplicated content, and things split up in weird ways, but not in any way that prevents you from locating the menus, more head scratching than throwing things at the screen.


Performance
Once you have it all set up, how does it work? Quite well, but at times it can be a bit slow, something that comes down to the sheer available horsepower of the XScale CPU. The initial format, in this case four Western Digital WD3200SD drives took several hours, and the CPU utilization was at or near 100% the whole time. This is not uncommon, if you set up a soft RAID-5 on a PC, you will eat a significant percentage of your CPU for hours also, but the lack of a quick format option was a little annoying. Basically, start the format before you go home for the evening, you only need to do it once.

You can hot add drives to the mix and replace failed drives on RAID 1 or 5 setups. In both cases, it will automatically rebuild as soon as it detects the new drive, and your data will be accessible throughout, but you take a speed hit. This is a really nice feature, and makes low level maintenance a user task rather than one for an admin. If you put an N4100 at a remote office, staff can probably fix it without a visit by a tech, lowering overall costs.

One thing that you can not do is tweak an existing RAID setup without a reformat. If you set up a three drive stripe and want to add a fourth, you have to delete the RAID, and then remake it, losing all data. Same with RAID-5, and this goes for adding or subtracting drives. Several modern mobos can do this on the fly, but they have much more horsepower to play with, and aimed at a vastly different markets.

When I was first playing with the N4100, I thought this was a glaring omission, but the more I thought about it, the less problematic it sounded. To be honest, when you buy this box, you are going to buy four drives, and set up the biggest volume you can. If you only need two, buy an N2100 and save the cash. For the intended purpose, the number of users that morph their RAID is going to be exceedingly small. This is a box meant to be set up and forgotten about, and it does that just fine.

 

Once up, it is quite fast, more than enough to saturate the 100Mbps network I have here. A single 1.12GB file, the best case transfer for a box like this, took about 3.5 minutes to copy. A group of smaller files took a few seconds less to copy 1.07GB. This translates into about 42Mbps, or about all the throughput you can expect from a half-duplex 100Mbps ethernet link. The fact that the information transmitted, a single large or multiple small files, made no real world speed difference tells me that this test was completely network bound, the N4100 should take all you can throw at it over such a connection.

After initial setup, I copied 181GB of stuff to the box, a mixture of large and small files, ranging from several gigs down to a few K. If you get properties on the whole directory, it brings the machine to its knees, the first time took almost five minutes to churn through the 75,000 files and 7,100 directories. Subsequent passes were several times faster, but still slower than a modern CPU doing the same thing on a local drive. Yay, caching.

In any case, the good thing is that the performance you see, once you get the first byte, is the same, and again limited by the network, all three cases have the same net throughput. More CPU would speed it up, but cost more and suck more power. Unless you have heavy loading, and multiple users hitting it simultaneously, it should be plenty fast for anything you need. If you are looking for two GigE wire-speed transfers, well, you need to step up to a bigger and much more expensive box.

Once nice feature they have is called Webdisk, it puts your files up on the net in HTML format, and has secure (HTTPS://) and normal (HTTP://) versions.. You have the same access rights as a direct SMB connection, no special configuration is needed. Everything is button based, upload, download and delete files in a way that will be familiar to most surfers. With two ethernet ports, you can put one on your internal subnet, the other on an external address giving you a quick and dirty remote file access solution.

A bit more granularity would be nice in this situation, you can only give users rights to folders, not to a given interface or protocol. If they can see a file at the office, they can see it remotely. You can turn services on and off for everyone, but not for a port. Once again, this is not the end of the world, but it would be nice to have.

The target market will probably not miss these features much. Should you want more advanced functionality, you can always tie it in to Active Directory and use that to administer things in a slightly more advanced way.

The N4100 has setup instructions for Windows and Macs, but the Linux support is limited to SMB/CIFS support. Because of SAMBA, this should not be a big deal, but native support would be welcome in the future.

Conclusion
Overall, the Thecus N4100 is a solid box for its target market. A quick check around the web shows several places that have it for around $980, give or take a bit. With four 250GB drives, you can get almost a TB of usable space for $1600, the $1.50/GB NAS barrier is about to fall.

With no problems found in my beating it around, and throughput limited by my network, I would have no problem buying an N4100 for a small business. The only issues I found in testing were oddities in the UI and granularity in the permissions. The UI parts can be safely ignored, they will only be used once on setup. The granularity of permissions is exactly what I would expect from this class of device, it is not meant to be an EMC monster. As long as it will be enough for you, and I expect that it will, this is a great little NAS box.