Storage once again has three sub-menus, Disks, RAID and Folder. Disks is an exact duplicate of the Disks section of the System screen above, hence the head scratching, The RAID menu has the RAID level, usable capacity, status and capacity used. It also contains an estimated time remaining for any config changes or rebuilding. All five of these menus could and should be combined into a single menu, it would make more sense and remove a lot of duplication, but does not hurt anything as it is.
The only interesting button on the RAID screen is the one that says Config, and it brings you to a well laid out push-button raid setup screen. It lists all the drives, has radio buttons for RAID level, JBOD, 0, 1 and 5, and check boxes for RAID or spare. You click the ones you want, pick a stripe size from a drop down menu, and hit create. If you want to break down the RAID, there is a remove button. If this menu presents any problems for you, you should not be using the N4100, it really can't get much easier without an animated paper clip.
The last of the Storage menus is called Folder, and it does what it says, lets you make folders. When you add one, you pick a name and description, then public and browsable, all options pretty much do what they say. If you make a folder public, it is just that, anyone can read and write to it. If you do not pick public, the ACL or Access Control Lists come into play.
ACLs are a very basic form of permissions, you can pick a user or a group, and set one of three permissions, Deny, Read Only or Writable. They do exactly what you think they would do, and not much more or less. One little UI gaffe, the ACL sub-menu is in a popup for no apparent reason, the only one of the whole menu structure. The adding of users and groups is accomplished elsewhere with no direct link from the ACL screen, so you will have to flip back and forth if you are anything less than perfectly organized.
The Network Menu has two LAN menus, one for each port, and a Service menu. The LAN ones allow you to set host name, domain name, DHCP and IP settings. Everything you would expect. Service lets you set WebDisk, Secure WebDisk, SMB and UPnP support, all have on and off with no extraneous settings other than port. Again, clear, straightforward, and probably should all be collapsed into a single menu.
Accounts has Users, Groups and Authentication. Groups let you make a group, Users let you make users, set passwords, and add users to groups. Authentication lets you assign a WINS server, set workgroups, and add an Active Directory server to authenticate off of. Pretty straightforward, and easy to use, but the Authentication should really be grouped with the networking settings, and user/group creation should be with the Folders, or vice-versa. The documentation is very sparse, but if you can set up an AD based network, this should present absolutely no problem for you.
The System menu has Notification, beep or email, Logs, Time, Config Management, Firmware Upgrade, Admin Password, Shutdown and Logout. All do exactly what you would expect them to except for Config Management. This one is actually really handy, it lets you download the unit config as a file and upload it later, either to this or other boxes. The one problem is that it is not a human readable file, so you can't easily go in and edit the thing if you need to set up multiple boxes. I would classify that as a missed opportunity, a plain text file here would be a perk.
The last menu is Language, and it does what it says, sets the language. English, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, German and Italian are the options, but since I am an ignorant 'murrican, I only need the first.
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, but 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 it's 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.
Similar behavior was seen when copying large directories of small files. The initial sorting is what does it, and that is once again completely processor bound. If you copy a single large file, it kicks off almost instantly, and CPU use isn't all that high, about 50%. A gig of smaller files averaging about 5MB will put you at higher loads, but will not max it out. Copying 50GB of similar files will take a lot longer to get the first byte out as it sorts the list, and then it will peg the CPU at 100%.
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 2 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.
Overall, the Thecus N4100 is a solid box for it's target market. A quick check around the web shows several places that have it for around $700, give or take a bit. With four 320GB drives, you can get almost a TB of usable space for $1000, the $1/GB NAS barrier is about to fall. With no problems found in my beating on it, 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.
3/3
The INQ
Hybrid Mode
