Thecus N4310 4-bay: A NAS-ty beast for the budget-conscious

Self storage for the light of pocket

Review When The Reg did a roundup of four bay NAS units a few months back, it was mentioned that it was intended to put the latest Thecus model, the N4310, up against some of its competitors.

The company was finalising some firmware tweaks before launch, though, so it wasn’t available in time. But now I’ve got my hands on one to see how it performs and if it lives up to the Thecus marketing spiel of "exceptional performance and easy data management at an unprecedented value."

Thecus N4310 4-bay NAS box

Right, cards on the table from the off. Thecus NAS boxes and I don’t seem to get along or perhaps I should rephrase that: my initial choice of hard disk drives and Thecus NAS boxes don’t seem to get along. It would appear the problem is with firmware recognising relatively new hard drives. It’s not exactly a problem unique to Thecus but it certainly did slow things down.

There were some other little niggles that led to lots of bad language (or thoughts that mirrored those of a tree branch-brandishing Basil Fawlty confronted with a truculent car) aimed at a poor defenceless boxes. A firmware update duly appeared and – even though there was an early skirmish with that – after three rounds I think I had the beating of it and it began to get on my good side. Indeed, teething troubles aside, it must be said that the Thecus N4310 might just be changing my mind.

Two external PSU ports

The Soho/Home N4310 is the 4-bay bigger brother of the two bay N2310, I say bigger, but for a 4-bay NAS box it’s pretty compact – measuring 135 x 170 x 217mm (HxWxD), compared to the 135 x 97 x 207mm of the N2310. The compactness of the design is helped by Thecus taking the major power supply components out of the box and using a small external 60W power brick instead. That’s the trade-off for a NAS of this size and not being able to simply shove in an IEC mains cable in the back might not suit everyone.

The front of the unit is simplicity itself, just a couple of buttons (Power and USB Copy), a vertical row of activity lights and the four drive bays. The drive trays themselves are easy to get in and out thanks to sprung doors, but not so easy that they can be accidentally opened. The trays support 3.5in and 2.5in drives but you’ll need a screwdriver to fix any drives in place.

Open door

Besides the grille for the cooling fan on the back panel, there is the LAN port, a couple of USB3.0 ports, a reset button and very usefully two power in ports so there’s some power redundancy support but to achieve that you’ll have to buy a second power brick, which is less appealing.