Thecus N3200 Pro

The price at the top of the page is for the diskless version, but Thecus provided us with a 1.5TB unit populated with three 500GB Western Digital Caviar Green drives, sensibly mounted in a RAID5 array. RAID5 allows any one of the drives to fail without data loss; RAID0, 1 and JBOD are also supported.

Hot-swapping of drives is quick and easy. Unclip the front fascia, unscrew two spring-mounted screws, and drives are free to simply slide out. Installation is tool-free.
Performance was among the best in the group. Large files gave read and write speeds of 44MB/sec and 28MB/sec, while small files saw the N3200 Pro manage 19MB/sec and 19MB/sec respectively.

Power draw was modest too, with the N3200 Pro consuming 25W at idle and 32W under load.
It isn’t short on features, either. You get UPnP and iTunes support along with print and FTP servers.

The front USB port allows for the contents of external drives to be copied to a preset folder, and two more at the rear allow further storage and a printer to be added. You can connect a USB wireless dongle, plus there’s an eSata port and a WAN port alongside the Gigabit Ethernet socket.

Thecus’ N3200 Pro is a fine consumer-friendly NAS device, only pipped to the post by Synology’s superior web-interface and slightly more comprehensive feature set. However, with RAID5 offering a good balance between performance, security and optimal storage space, and the tool-free drive installation, some may find the Thecus’ talents better suit their requirements.

• - Labs Winner -
  Synology ds209+
• - Recommended -
  Netgear ReadyNAS Duo
• 
  Maxtor Shared Storage II
• 
  Western Digital ShareSpace 4TB
• 
  Iomega StorCenter ix2 2TB
• 
  LaCie Network Space 500GB