It is much less energy-hungry than the N4800 and has no fans

Oct 8, 2012 19:01 GMT  ·  By

Since network-attached storage devices are a mature market now, Thecus, one of the companies most deeply involved in the segment, has to offer extra perks in order to outdo its competitors, like Ciphertex, Shuttle, D-Link, Synology and others.

One of the NAS devices, that has been selling for a while, is called N4800 and, as far as such things go, is more than decent.

At least, Thecus says it sold so well that it made sense to use it as a basis for creating a new one: N4800Eco.

It is easy enough to guess what the newcomer has that its predecessor does not: better energy efficiency.

To be specific, the newcomer uses 20% less power than the N4800, thanks to a new Intel Atom CPU (central processing unit) and the fanless motherboard.

None of this came at too great a cost though. While the price of the network storage station will be above that of the normal N4800, nothing else has changed for the worse.

That is to say, the newcomer still has all it needs to perform its duty well: USB 3.0 ports, eSATA connectivity, an HDMI outputs (for direct streaming to monitors/HDTVs), four 3.5-inch drive bays (compatible with 2.5-inch drives, 16TB max total capacity) and 2 GB of DDR3 RAM (random access memory).

As for software, in addition to the ThecusOS 5.0 (OS stands for operating system), the company tossed in McAfee antivirus protection.

All in all, the N4800Eco easily qualifies as a strong and efficient storage centralization solution for small and medium businesses. The support for RAID O, 1, 5, 6, 10, JBOD is a nice bonus too (up to 3 multiple RAID modes), and it helps that ThecusOS 5.0 includes the Data Burn (writes files to a USB-connected optical drive) and Data Guard technologies (creates remote backups on other NAS servers in the network).