Final Words & Conclusion

Final words and conclusion

This conclusion will be simple, yet I always manage to mess it up by still typing like a thousand words (1707 actually), I know right? G33k! Thecus offers up a very impressive NAS. It is diverse, fast and comes with properly specced hardware like the quad-core Celeron and 4GB (expandable to 8GB) SODIMM memory. Combined with ThecusOS 7, that symbiosis of a proper GUI, functionality and all APP related items this product shines. Price wise, heck, it's not bad either. Typically the market value of a consumer NAS is 150 EURO per bay based on your average hardware specs, so a product like shown today offers that quad-core processor, 4GB, 4 HDD trays and everything else. You'd expect the product to be in the 600 EURO range for specs alone, well the N4810 is selling for 460 EURO (street price) here in the Netherlands, and yes, that makes this a high-end NAS offered at an attractive price. And please do remember, this is a low-energy server and not just a little box to stream files from. 

The XBMC / Kodi implementation (you need to install it from the APP center) on this unit works well, we recommend 1080p but sure, Ultra HD can be played as well as the Kodi version used has been optimized and is hardware accelerated (if your content is compatible) through the IGP of the processor. That feature also gives low 10~20% CPU loads as the IGP is doing all the decoding - hint - anything downloadable as .MKV will very likely run. Your playback typically can however run into issues if all of a sudden the NAS starts to unpar/rar files or something weird though. But realistically that may be expected. 

A NAS for HTPC usage remains limited but granted it does work good enough. Combined with the apps the unit offers the sky is the limit when it comes to running your own webserver based on MySQL. Also handy to know, on the media side of things there are sharing/streaming apps like Plex available so that you can stream content towards the player on your TV or, alternatively, Media box. Downloading wise all your Usenet and Bittorent apps are covered as well. Both offer good download speeds with this NAS. We would like to see NZBGET implemented as an APP though, as it is way faster compared to SABNZBD.

Overall usage

We mention this in most of our reviews, but the sheer majority of you guys will have a Gigabit switch and a Gigabit jack on your PC. After QoS and error correction, that is how fast this NAS can be. Pairing and link aggregation remains a difficult to set up feature so we'll focus on single Gigabit performance for now. We had no issues passing 100 MB/sec on our reads and writes, though the Anvil tests showed slower read performance (but this test does apply complex workloads intended for SSDs). Obviously your HDD can be slower than the performance we just mentioned. Especially with small files (heaps of them) a 5400 RPM HDD will be slow. It's the HDD IO and cache capability, not the NAS, so please keep that in mind. Lovely to see however is that you can mount an SSD and enable SSD caching. This way your read/write/IO/iops performance will dramatically increase, but at the cost of an SSD and one HDD tray of course.

The new N4810 model got an upgrade to a Celly quad-core processor, that does show a tiny bit on power consumption. At IDLE we see 10W with one SSD and the Intel Celeron Quad-core, still that is not bad at all. If our 4-bay model would use 10 Watts on average over the year that would cost ((10/1000) x (24 x 365)) x 0.21 Cents = 18.40 Euro per year to run (based on Dutch energy prices). Adding more HDDs will double up that number, but remember, your HDDs most of the time will be in sleep mode. And that definitely is energy friendly, good for the environment and good for your wallet. A notable mention as well is that the OS supports multiple file-systems for local storage like the always popular EXT4 system, XFS and Btrfs are supported as well. The Btrfs filesystem has options like pooling, checksums, and other features. However, performance with Btrfs will be slower opposed to XFS and EXT4. But hey, choices are good, right?

Performance

The new processor and memory make this unit plenty fast for normal NAS operation, it felt really responsive so i have no complaints here whatsoever. Overall we reached high transfer speeds over our single Gigabit Ethernet connection and though Ethernet will always bring in some performance and lag issues over a network connection, it's plenty fast for all your file and web activities. With large files and a fast enough HDD over a Gigabit connection you will reach 100~115 MB/sec on reads and writes. For this type of connection, really it can hardly go any faster unless you'd go with two NICs at link aggregation (which as explained is very complex and limited). The usage of a quad-core processor makes your applications fast and responsive, anything Apache and MySQL related for home usage will function fine as well. 

Flexibility

You'll have your FTP server, you can upload images and music, make slideshows out of them and show them on the web server of the device or watch photos and videos with the help of a software suite on even your smartphone. You can stream DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) and this NAS can be automatically discovered by Digital Media Players (DMP), Digital Media Renders (DMR) and Digital Media Controllers (DMC) allowing pictures, music and video to be shared instantly at any time at home. All DLNA Certified Devices are capable of streaming content instantly from this NAS. You can share files over the internet if you wanted to, and the list goes on and on. Keep in mind though that everything on this box is targeted at consumers and small business users (SOHO). Though you can access the WEB directory and make your own website, control and configuration over, say, the MySQL server we do warn you to take security measures. Make sure you secure your public files with proper Unix/Linux permissions. Thus at least a CHMOD 755 on Directories and preferably 644 on files. You can log in to the box through SSH. A fun extra feature is the HDMI and DisplayPort connector and thus (Ultra) HD television compatibility. On Ultra HD you are limited to that HDMI connector (1.4a) though and thus are stuck at 30 Hz. Full HD 1080P (60 Hz) is supported. From there onwards just connect a keyboard and mouse to one of the USB ports on the NAS and in the home screen you can access the admin interface of this NAS. Obviously XBMC is your choice of weaponry here, wehich is located and optimized by Thecus and housed as standard from the APP Store.

Energy efficiency

We tested performance on this unit with an SSD so that we could be certain the storage unit would never be a bottleneck in terms of measuring storage performance. This SSD uses roughly 3.5 Watts. The traditional HDD these days uses roughly 5 Watts. If you use one 8TB HDD for example, this unit would still hover in or at the 10~14 Watt range under load with one HDD, a very reasonable number TBH. That said, in idle and low usage circumstances the NAS unit uses roughly 14 Watts with two HDDs and under load (HDD usage both units) and playing back video you'll reach the 20 Watt marker, which is still very low. Four active HDDs in RAID would get to in the 20~30 Watt range, but again in IDLE / Sleep mode that would drop down to, say, 15~20 Watts.  

Final words and verdict

A while ago we tested the N2810, at that time I made some remarks about the dual-core processor and 2GB of memory. A perfectly fine little product really, but it all could have been a notch better price and specs wise. Thecus made a true solid on that. The new N4810 delivers on all fronts as it received a properly fast quad-core processor that remains energy efficient, it received an upgrade to 4GB which we feel is perfect as well. From there onwards it's all good, we see ThecusOS 7 grow with each update that passes. It offers a user friendly environment to work in (albeit operating Linux NAS servers does require proper PC knowledge setting up users and shares).

The last bit is the APP center. Everything you will ever need is there, there are dozens if not hundreds of apps available to you to install and fool around with. Lacking in our review unit however was installable CMS software like Joomla and Wordpress, but that will be added in another update Thecus has told me. Again I'd like to recommend Thecus get an NZBGET app available as it is so much faster than SABNZBD. Other than that there is nothing to nitpick about. Power consumption is good and lovely to see are the HDMI and DP connectors so that you can even use the unit as a KODI media center. 

This N4810 model with N3160 quad-core processor and 4GB of DDR3L RAM will cost, give or take, 465 EURO (varies per country) and is most definitely worth that money. Thecus however has a bit of an underdog position here in the EU compared to QNAP, Synology and ASUStor, that status is not deserved as the current builds rank high up there in A-class NAS consumer and SOHO servers. The overall specs, features and performance is good, it is Gigabyte Ethernet compatible and we feel the price is fair for what you get, remember you are not purchasing a file streaming unit, you are purchasing a low power SOHO server. We can recommend the Thecus N4810 for both that SOHO and consumer side of the market. What an incredibly fun and properly specced product. 

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