Thecus NAS N4100Pro

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I've purchased a year and a half ago a NAS from Thecus. It's the N4100Pro model which you can see on the right.



The purpose of this post is to tell how I'm satisfied with my Thecus NAS !

It's so rare that the product is good and the support by the company is so good that It needs to be shout ! ;)
Usually, what you can read on internet is complains, issue...

Here it's just about satisfaction !

First, the installation and setup was easy, the features was here and working.
Ok it's what I've paid for...

But I've been quite surprised that Thecus was actually updating the firmware and adding functionality regularly which gives some new functionality, new user interface.

Just compare this situation to Sony :  I've bought a laptop half a year ago, with windows vista. I've upgrade to windows 7 :  they offer no support for windows 7 at all for my laptop. No driver, no help. The result : My laptop battery hold 1 hour max. The webcam do not work...

There is plenty of other lack of support : My old mobiles (sony Z5, siemens, samsung U600): very few or no firmware update.

My Current HTC Magic, I'm stuck with Android 1.6 and I can only drool over Android 2.1/2.2...

But let's get back to Thecus.

They've switch the user interface in a major firmware upgrade (2.x to 3.x) to ExtJS which end to a very user-friendly interface, and they recently upgrade it again and it's even nicer, with a flash login interface ! (if no flash is available, a standart interface will replace it)

A module system, which is share with many other products allow to add functionnality to the NAS :


Item Version Date Download
NZB module (wget download style) v1.0.0 2010.04.15
USB & eSATA schedule backup module v1.01 2010.03.05
RAID Volume Replication module v1.0 2010.03.05
Twonky media server module v1.0 2010.03.05
DLM2 module (Bit Torrent Client, FTP Client,
eMule Client)		 v1.0.9 2009.10.06
MySQL module v1.00.02 2009.09.23
Web Server module v1.0.4 2009.09.23
Bi-directional USB copy module v1.0.3 2009.09.23
IP CAM module v2.0.1 2009.09.23
Even some modules from 5200PRO are compatible, see this link. Noteworthy : SSH Deamon !


And finally, they've got a JIRA style support interface (it uses http://www.kayako.com/ software and it's very nice) where you can get help or ask for feature request. They do respond like normal brained human ;)

Here is some screenshots of the web interface  :




Some resources :
Note : unsponsored blog post... I'm really happy with this product and the company!

    Comments

    Grant K Bingham said…
    I've just ordered a 4200. Can't wait. Heard from different places about the excellent reliability and build offered by the Thecus range 4100, 4200 etc - and have used them at various customers - and have been very impressed.

    I'm also impressed by the energy shown by the company to add value to the package and to improve it. I'm tired of plastic builds and poor design, overheating, drive failures, failed migrations etc.

    I'm disappointed by some of the review's I've seen online comparing network storage devices like these. They appear to be soldby the prettiness of some of the home style builds - did they think that people want peace of mind - for years (not weeks). You want to know that data, photo's and documents are safe.
    10 June 2010 at 22:47
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