Date: March 28, 2007
Author(s): Greg King
If you are looking for a quality NAS, the N2100 from Thecus is worth your consideration. It can act as a music and photo sharing hub and even an FTP server, among others. Though, the best part might be it’s price.
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With more and more people jumping on the digital bandwagon we now have more users downloading music and videos at record paces. Also, as households continue to grow, they often need more than one PC, and thus the need for a unified, safe and secure storage solution has never been greater. With the demand for centralized storage, be it at home or a small business, one convenient and often cheaper solution is a network attached storage (NAS) box to fill those needs.
With a NAS box, multiple users can access files stored in one convenient location. Another great use for a NAS box is critical data backups. Most people these days have digital cameras. Like their film counterparts, these cameras are used to capture special times in our lives that we don’t necessarily want to forget about. With a NAS box, a routine backup can be set that will archive precious data like family photos or an extensive music collection on a weekly basis.
When it comes to backing up critical data, it’s always best to back it up as often as possible, and ideally, in more than one place. At my day job, we backup every bit of mission critical data once a week and take those backups to an off site location where we place them in a fireproof safe. In the event of an emergency, we can simply retrieve the data from the safe and load all of the backed up data. While there are certain scenarios where this will not help much, such as a large scale fire for example, this does offer an incredible amount data security, assuming the servers don’t just catch fire. If that happens, there are far worse things to worry about.
While an off site back up is normal in industries, it’s an unrealistic process for small business or home users. Whether it’s too cost prohibitive or time consuming, there are better ways to back up your data. One such way to get the piece of mind of a data backup is to house that critical data in more than one spot or on separate hard drives. The convenience of one central location and the redundancies of two separate hard drives can be found now in small NAS boxes like the Thecus N2100.
Catering to the security conscious network admin or home user, Thecus produces affordable network storage devices for large business as well as end users like you and me. Today, we are taking a look at their popular N2100 2 disk Y.E.S. box. Allowing the end users to set up storage in RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD, the N2100 appears to be an all in one storage device. Throughout our month with the NAS box, we tested its features and worked with the device daily. Read on to find out what we found out.
Thecus ships all of their N2100s in an attractive red box. On the front, we see gads of people enjoying themselves, possibly to show that with the N2100, you can securely store the photos of their enjoyable times. Whatever it means, it catches your attention, beckoning you to read more. One nice thing about the packaging is the handle on the top of the case. While nothing ground breaking or revolutionary, it is a nice extra that helps when lugging the thing around.
Moving to the side of the box, Thecus as listed not only the uses of the N2100 Y.E.S. box, but also the features of it as well. These include the ability to use the device as a FTP server, an iTunes server, file sharing as well as the options to use RAID 1 or 0 and connectivity information. One thing to notice and it’s something that this editor deeply appreciates seeing more and more of, is the RoHS compliance logo. With everyone doing their part, big or small, the environment will ultimately be a better place for us all.
The back of the box talks a bit more about the included software and how the Y.E.S. box has multi-language support. This, fittingly, is mentioned in 6 different languages.
Once opened up, the N2100 comes securely packaged in the middle of a cardboard shell. Also, to protect the unit from scratches in transit, the NAS box comes in a plastic bag as we can see in the next photo.
Once out of the package, Thecus has shipped the N2100 with a few accessories to help get you up and going. Included is a small manual to help get you started, a software disk and a warranty card.
Also provided are an external power supply, an Ethernet cable and a small bag of screws to mount the hard drive(s) in the NAS box itself. While there aren’t any special bells and whistles to mention, Thecus has been very careful to provide you with everything you will need to set up the Y.E.S. box at home, or at work.
Moving to the NAS box itself, the Y.E.S. box Thecus provided us is an attractively designed piece. With a black exterior with silver and chrome trim, the N2100 is a piece that will look good just about anywhere in a home or office. Just beware though; the reflective black will attract fingerprints like crazy.
On the front, from left to right, we have the large power button, six different LED indicators, a lone USB port and one smaller button above the USB port. This button provides a quick and easy way to back up the contents of a USB flash drive with a simple push of a button.
Moving to the back, there is an assortment of ports, as well as an exhaust area for the cooling fan located on the inside of the device. Starting from left to right, there is a power jack, a pair of USB 2.0, an exhaust for the fan and a pair of 10/100/1000 networks ports. Just above the network jacks is a small opening for a wireless antenna should you choose to install one down the road. The wireless option is something that is currently not offered by Thecus in the N2100 but as we will see shortly, the motherboard does have room for a card. More on this later.
Time to tear the N2100 and see what she’s made of.
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On the back of the unit, at the top, there is a pair of screws. These are all that hold the top of the Y.E.S. box in place. Once those two screws are removed the top can easily be slid back to unlock it from the top and the lifted up. This gives us access to the inside of the NAS box and we initially see the hard drive cage attached to the motherboard and help on by four attached screws. In the image, you can also see the 128MB of DDR RAM used by the N2100 in a standard DDR memory slot.
Once the hard drive caddy is removed, we can get a good look at the motherboard itself as well as the assortment of chips that it uses to operate. On the N2100, Thecus decided to arm the Y.E.S. box with a 600MHz Intel XScale 80219 general purpose processor. This is the same chip that can be found in many pocket PCs. As mentioned before, the device uses 128 MB of DDR RAM as well.
Here is a close up of the Intel XScale 80219.
To control the pair of gigabit NICs found at the back of the N2100, there is a set of Realek 8110 chips.
Just above the Realtek chips, there is a Silicon Image SATA chip.
As mentioned earlier, the N2100 Y.E.S. box has 128MB of DDR RAM at its disposal.
Moving on, right above the XScale processor, there is a space where a wireless NIC card can be installed. While the option is there, we are unsure if the Thecus N2100 supports the use of a wireless card. There is however, a short list of wireless USB adapters that are supported by the Thecus N2100. As stated earlier, there is a spot on the back of the N2100 where an external antenna can be placed should wireless be what you are looking for.
At the back of the motherboard, there is a small slot that the hard drive cage’s bridge card fits into. This is how the hard drives connect to the motherboard. Just behind this slot is the exhaust fan.
Taking a quick look at the hard drive cage, we can see that there is room for a pair of hard drives and they connect via SATA connectors. The cage is made out of aluminum and is help to the motherboard through 4 small attached screws. At the end of the cage, there is a thin plastic shroud to help keep the airflow from the fan flowing around the hard drives and not put anywhere into the enclosure.
At the back of the cage, we see the bridging card that connects the hard drives to the motherboard. Power and data both run through this card.
On the inside of the cage, we can see the SATA connections a bit clearer.
Now that you have seen what’s under the hood, let’s get to installing.
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After the hard drives are installed into the cage and then installed onto the motherboard, the next thing that needs to be done is to install the provided software. Prior to installing the programs, make sure to connect your Y.E.S. box to your network as one of the early steps in the install process is letting the software seek out your NAS box. After placing the disk in the drive, we are greeted with this screen…
From here, we clicked the Y.E.S. box Windows Setup Wizard to get things started.
Once the setup wizard is started, and assuming your Y.E.S. box in connected to your network, the installation process will search your network for any connected Thecus products. Once finished, and your Y.E.S. box is detected and selected, click next.
By default, the N2100 comes hard set with the IP address 192.168.1.100. If this is in use in your existing network, it needs to be corrected. As you can see in my picture, I assigned the N2100 an IP of 192.168.1.110. You will be prompted with a warning about the NAS box being in the same network segment as you.
After clicking OK, we are brought to a login screen. The user name is by default "admin" and the password, like many other products, is "admin" too.
From here, we can choose to let DHCP do its thing or assign the N2100 a static IP of your choosing. As stated earlier, I choose to give it a static IP address. For most, DHCP will be the easiest course of action.
The next screen will allow you to choose how you want to use your Y.E.S. box. If you are content with it acting as a simple storage drive, then you do not need to check anything. However, should you want to sue the N2100 as an iTunes or FTP server, you will need to check either both, or both should you choose to.
Once you have chosen how you want to use your Y.E.S. box, you now need to decide how you’re hard drives are going to work. On the next screen, you have the options of JBOD (one drive or a pair of mismatched drives), RAID 0 (STRIPED data, increased performance) or RAID 1 (mirrored data, redundant drives for security but storage space is halved.) Once you decide how you want your NAS to behave, and in our testing, we choose RAID 1, you simply click next.
The next screen in the setup process allows us to change the password to something of our choosing. I chose to change ours to something a little less predictable than "admin" but you can leave it be if it’s not something that you are overly concerned with. With everything though, we encourage you to make your network as secure as possible because you didn’t shell out the money for this NAS box if you didn’t care about your data.
Upon completion, a browser opens up. Notice the address. You can easily access this by typing in the IP address that you assigned to the Y.E.S. box earlier, during setup.
From here, you can check setup your iTunes music folders, your FTP folder as well as your photo publisher folder. On the end is a login screen that will take you to the options page. From here, you can set up your RAID; check the health of your hard drives, check to see how much of the CPU is being used. This is where you can access your folders, delete content, add user permissions and monitor your network activity.
It should also be mentioned that the Y.E.S. box can also be used as a print server. This is not something that we used in the testing of the N2100.
Let’s give the N2100 a good test and then conclude with our final thoughts.
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To test out the functionality of the Y.E.S. box, a pair of Seagate 320GB SATA II drives were used. We configured them in a RAID 1 array for data redundancy. To connect to the N2100, a Linksys WRT54GS 10/100 router was used. We unfortunately will not be able to test the N2100 on a true gigabit network but we will compare the differences shortly in the forums.
To test out the Y.E.S. box out we worked in iTunes, moved files around, streamed music and video. On multiple computers (3) streaming music was not a problem and preformed flawlessly. The same can be said for video as well. The interface was easy to navigate but the manual could have been a bit more robust. All in all, the entire experience was a positive one.
While file transfers were being done, we HTTP’d into the box to check on the CPU usage. While the files were moving along reasonably well, the CPU usage was up around 100% when it wasn’t completely loaded down. This resulted in a bit of difficulty accessing the box at times but with some patience, we were able to get in and monitor the system resources.
To copy and back up the contents of our test thumb drive, all that was needed was to place the USB drive in the front jack and simply press the front button. This automatically transferred all of the contents into the usbcopy folder on the Y.E.S. box. This is nice for someone like me, or anyone for that matter that uses their flash drive constantly, to be able to back up anything that you might have on it of value.
All in all, the Thecus N2100 Y.E.S. box left us very impressed. The ease of use when setting up the NAS box could be slightly daunting for networking novices, but with some time, and close examination of the manual, most anyone can set up this device with relative ease. While we are talking about the manual, the only physical documentation included in with the N2100 was the quick install guide.
The full manual can be found on the driver disk in the form of a .pdf file. While it covers everything that the Y.E.S. box has to offer, there are places where it could be a bit more in depth but overall, all but the newest of users can easily figure things out. At the end of the day, the Thecus Y.E.S. box has earned a solid 9 out of 10 with an editor’s choice award. Not many NAS boxes offer RAID like this one does and then, not many are in this price range. While the end user has to provide their own hard drives, the box itself can be found online in the mid $200 dollar range, placing it well within reach of small businesses and home users alike.
As stated earlier, check back in the forums for updates to the performance of the Thecus N2100 Y.E.S. box when used on a gigabit network compared to the 100 base network that we used in this review.
If you have a comment you wish to make on this review, feel free to head on into our forums! There is no need to register in order to reply to such threads.
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