THERE WERE A LOT of NAS boxes at the last IDF, one of which was the
Thecus N4100, a four drive SOHO/SMB NAS box. They 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 smaller sibling of the N4100, the N2100 was gone over
here, but the N4100 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, and you can get a good idea of the unit's size from the red DIMM on the right. It is 256MB of DDR-400 made in this case 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. This probably explains why it was showcased at IDF.
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, you can see the 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.
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