Final thoughts and rating

The four-bay NAS market is becoming increasingly competitive, with viable solutions now available from the likes of Thecus, QNAP, Synology, Netgear and Drobo to name but a few. Prices for the aforementioned range from £400 to £650, putting the £540 Thecus N4200 somewhere in the middle.

Pricing is relatively keen, but Thecus needs to differentiate from the competition and does so with an emphasis on stability. Hoping to maintain an edge, the N4200 offers a selection of useful reliability features including a dual-DOM design and a battery backup module - both of which will provide an added sense of security to those with critical data.

There's still work to be done in terms of overall refinement, but whilst the N4200 isn't the most aesthetically pleasing NAS available, its extensive list of features and solid all-round performance make it a viable solution for most users.

The Good

Constantly-improving web interface
Excellent stability features
Good performance

The Bad

Setup could and should be easier
Doesn't quite feel like a £540 product

HEXUS Rating

Thecus N4200

HEXUS Where2Buy

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Price is a bit of a shocker really!!

£540 quid? Jesus…

can also purchase the Thecus from http://www.span.com for £438.00 +VAT

I have to say, (and am open to convincing) that I dont really understand these premium NAS products. Once you go above say £200 doesnt it become a better solution simply to build a dedicated PC for the job, for example an Atom mini-itx jobby.

Have it running a linux distro or FreeNAS and you are good to go. Help me out here dedicated NAS users, am I missing something?

Champman99
I have to say, (and am open to convincing) that I dont really understand these premium NAS products. Once you go above say £200 doesnt it become a better solution simply to build a dedicated PC for the job, for example an Atom mini-itx jobby.

Have it running a linux distro or FreeNAS and you are good to go. Help me out here dedicated NAS users, am I missing something?

The idea is that they should “just work”, no messing about, and proper support from the vendor or manufacturer. Whether this happens in reality or not is another issue, but that's the idea.

Also the majority of companies are pretty adverse to ‘home built’ systems of any kind. they like turn key solutions. And that's if they have someone capable of building it in the first place. There definitely is a market for them, that's obvious by the number in the market, but they are not for everyone.

I'll admit I was expecting lower power figures. I recently built a core i3 system that idles around 30w at the wall (though admittedly with only 1 drive, not 4). But that is with a 330w power supply that is clearly not going to be ultra efficient at just less than 10% of it's rated output.

Maybe I'm expecting too much, but I thought low power was the other main advantage of these ready built systems on top of the plug and play/reliability issues Funkstar mentioned.

What I have been looking for for some time is a pineview atom board with 6 (or at least 4) sata ports. The only one I've seen was iirc a supermicro one that you could only get for around £200 in the UK.

EDIT: to answer my own question, this was a useful link http://www.linuxtech.net/features/intel_atom_pineview_motherboards_overview.html

A nice list of all (?) pineview based boards. Seems the limit of 2 sata ports on most boards is because that's all the intel NM10 chipset provides. a few boards have 4 or even 6 sata ports though that's managed by adding a separate Sata chip supplying the extra ports.