Thecus N4100PRO NAS Server

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I am now the proud owner of two of these. I use one of them with 2 x 1TB drives in RAID1 for all my personal and work related stuff. The second one serves up all my movies and music. I had set this up with 2 x 1.5 TB drives in RAID1, but quickly ran out of space. I purchased two additional 1.5 TB drives, added them in, and migrated to a 4 x 1.5 TB RAID5 array. It did this automatically and I now have apx 4.0 TB of total storage!!!! It did take quite a while for it to migrate to the new array, but everything stayed intact and works great. I did do a memory upgrade on both units. I replaced the 256 Meg SODIMM with a Crucial 1024MB PC3200 DDR 400MHz SODIMM. Saw an improvement in throughput. I definitely recommend these!

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I had the server for over two weeks before I got it properly configured. It needs to be set on the WAN port for optimum performance. Manual is no help in setting this up. After all the kinks worked out, it is a fast solid performer.

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Good Enough for my work

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I got my Thecus N4100PRO NAS Media Server as Christmas present. I set it up with 4 500GB Hard Drives as a RAID 10. It works like a charm and serves Windows, Apple and Linux clients. The manual is in some part difficult to understand but Googling problems helped a lot. Raid 10 gives excellent performance and data security and remove your worries.

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Consistently loses ability to authenticate against Active Directory. Support queries go unanswered and the tickets are automatically closed by their system without any response from their support. Support ticketing system removed my account. Ticketing system request form has about 100 required fields. There is NO technical support from the manufacturer whatsoever.

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I got my Thecus N4100PRO NAS Media Server the day before Christmas to my self and I am loving it. I started out putting 2 Hard Drive in with 2.0TB and set it up as a RAID 1

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It is a price but poorly setup manual for beginners. For the basic home user the manual is hard to fellow. The program isn't user freindly. You can't put a anti virus program on it. The server seems to be well built. I have called tech surpport three times and emailed and haven't received any response from them. The multimedia player won't link up with my xbox 360 to play movies. For the basic home user I think you need to get a unit that has microsoft home server as a program. It's alot better to work with.

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If you need a good NAS and don't want to pay $500 to $600 for it, this is the one. Great for storing video and music files. It uploads between 20-24MB per second on large 45GB files, which is pretty good. The modules suck, I would not even bother with them. You can go to the forums and tweak them to get them working if you need them. Right now I am testing this unit with 3 500GB drives in RAID 5 and waiting for my 4 2TB hard drives.

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I loaded 4 WD 500 GB drives in the enclosure, setup for RAID 6. Setting up took an extra 20 minutes to translate pictorial instructions to what needed to be done. Had to plug the ethernet cable to the correct plug in back. Once this was done the thing works very well. It lets you schedule 7 days a week when it will come on and when it turns off. It emails me on every event that occurs --very nice. 2TB raw equals about .85 TB under RAID 6 -- using default block size. If you are a small business or a home user and need and or want data reliability, this one is definitely worth having. Once I'd configured the NAS via it's web interface, It did everything on its own. I'm very pleased with this.

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Does what it said it would. Haven't figures out the webserver part yet but getting there. put in 2 1.5TB seagate drives and works perfectly.

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Does what it said it would. Easy to use. Upgraded the firmware easily. The media server seems to be working fine.

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Does pretty much everything i need it 2 do and more, great product.

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setup was easy, i have limited knowledge of these types of systems and i had it up and running within an hour. i am running a raid 0 with 2 1tb hitachi drives... running awesome!

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I love this product!! Easy to use and understand Rapid Array of Independent Disks standard model. Great documentation with clear explanations and good examples. Very stable and high performance unit. I am just using it out of the box as a home office Network Area Storage for my house, and I love it. Great features and usability and very stable and realiable. Highly recommended for home, small business.

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I purchased this with a pair of Western Digital 2TB drives. So far this has performed way beyond my expectations. The web interface was clean and simple to use, and the performance was great. With the additional modules that you can install from the Thecus website, or 3rd party modules, such as SSH, this is able to deal with pretty well anything you can throw at it. I can currently write to it about 20MB/s and read at close to 35MB/s.

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I've been generally impressed with this product. Like another review said, getting permissions set is a bit of a challenge but other than that I like it. I'm particularly fond of the LCD status panel and the fact that it has been running for quite some time with 4 @ WD RE3 750 GB drives and the temp is barely 100 degrees F. My home built NAS RAID box was HUGE and the drives generally ran 15 - 20 degrees hotter, even with supplemental cooling. My goal is to sell it to a client who needs lots of reliable storage on his network with drive redundancy. The initial RAID build took a long time...that's why I let it do its thing over the weekend.

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Sorry this isn't going to be a very technical review, I just wanted to throw my experience out there.....I set this up with 4 1TB drives as RAID-5 and so far it has been rock solid...and pretty darn fast.....( I know pretty darn is ambiguous, as I have not done any benchmarks on throughput because other variables in my setup are bottlenecks ) - The point being I have multiple machines hitting this, and it hasn't lost a beat....The setup was pretty easy...I had an issue with permissions / authentications at first, but I was able to get past that....The boot-up takes a while, but if that is the worst thing I don't mind...

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Purchased at a home office RAID 5 solution and have been very impressed. Using the system on a mixed Apple Windows network with no ill effects. A little tricky to setup on the permission (I am still in the process), but it is everything I wanted it to be (iTunes Server, NAS, etc.).

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I must admit I was a tad skeptical about how this device would perform given the low power AMD CPU. I have been quite pleasantly surprised. The device is by no means an enterprise class NAS, but it makes up for the extreme performance with features. I have experienced average read rates of 12-18 Mb/s and write rates of 8-13Mb/s. You can add all of the additional Thecus modules that are available for the 5200 Pro, including the Twonkey Media server. I have successfully used it as an AFP mount for every Mac in my home, and SMB mount for my XP boxes. It is more than capable of serving up HS content without issue. The initial RAID 5 set with 4 1.5 Tb Seagate drives took about 14 hours. A post build FSCK took about 3.5 hours. Overall, I am quite happy with this device.