One of them has two drive bays, the other as twice as many

Mar 1, 2013 14:00 GMT  ·  By

For anyone looking into network-attached storage devices, Thecus is as good a brand as any. In fact, the company has been making such products for years, being very heavily involved in business, enterprise and data center technology. There are two new network-attached storage devices that Thecus has completed: the N2520 and the N4520.

For those unsure of how to read the names, the former is a 2-bay model while the latter has four bays.

The number of supported drives is really the only difference between them. Everything else is identical, for the most part.

That means that the Thecus N2520 and N4520 both have the same Intel Atom CPU, Quick NAS accessibility with client utility, Auto Flashback Photo Gallery, HDMI output for media playback, and easy connection through DDNS.

They also have very quiet fans (20 dB) and an energy efficiency good enough to let them operate on just 9W while idle, and 14W while in full use.

"The integration of the new Intel Atom processor CE5315 and Thecus award-winning NAS is truly a revolution. We are proud to be the initial storage manufacture to embed Intel's first SoC storage dedicated chip," said Florence Shih, general manager of Thecus.

"This pairing is phenomenal because it offers a new energy efficient, multimedia powerhouse and performance driven NAS solution to the storage industry."

The N2520 has 1 GB of RAM, while the N4520 has 2 GB of DDR3. This is the only differing element besides the bay number (and, by extension, the top capacity).

Coupled with all the software that Thecus has on devices, the two should be just right for small and medium businesses. They will perform data backups, act as personal multimedia cloud servers, etc., all after an installation process of just 5 minutes.

Sadly, though the N2520 and N4520 have their product pages up, their prices are unknown. Then again, the HDDs will probably cost more than the NAS units themselves.