Introduction
Cast your mind back a few months, to when the sun shone more often and we weren't all in debt from Christmas. Back then, we brought you a review of the Thecus N4100 NAS device. Holding up to four SATA drives and supporting RAID 5, it was a fairly hefty piece of storage kit that would have been well suited to offices looking for somewhere central to store and share, or backup data. We felt, however, that for the home user, even the enthusiast, it was a little too much.
Since that time, Thecus has come forward with a new product, geared more towards the media-man market. Guys and gals pay attention. If you've got a lot of media, Thecus want you to get yourself a YES Box.
YES stands for "your enhanced storage" - a very personal kind of branding, don't you think? Also known as the N2100, it has a few things in common with the N4100, which we'll explore in due course, but it's not quite as expensive (or big) as the N4100 and some of the features listed for the N2100 make it clear that Thecus are going after the home theater crowd who are serious about storage.
Saving myself from a plethora of table tags, here's a link to the specifications of the N2100. We must briefly go over the important stuff, however. 20cm long, 16cm wide and 8.5cm high, this little box houses two SATA drives, with external USB connections for removable hard drives too. With a web interface, file sharing, FTP, user management, an iTunes (yes, iTunes) server and RAID support, it's looking for a place in your digital home. Let's take a look.
