Thecus N2810 NAS review - Introduction

Thecus N2810 Multimedia NAS server

We review the N2810 from Thecus, a Linux powered NAS unit that is price competitive while offering proper performance. Armed with a dual-core Intel Celeron processor and 2GB of memory with the ability to upgrade, this unit rocks and offers a lot in a crowded NAS channel. The N2810 can take 2 HDDs, has low power consumption, but most of all can be used for 1080p / 4k HTPC accelerated media playback as it has HDMI out and sports a custom version of XBMC (Kodi).

While the dynamics have changed rapidly over the past few years, our demand for massive volume storage capacity has increased. With the help of WiFi and Gigabit Ethernet in general in our homes we started evolving in our lifestyle and thus requirements. It's exactly in the lifestyle segment where the latest NAS units come in. NAS units are really small handy servers that not only function as storage devices, they are getting more functionality combined with ease of use as well. With prices going down, and everybody having high-speed Gigabit LAN Ethernet at home, the market is slowly adapting and targeting NAS devices at a hard-to-convince and very money attentive consumer. One of the companies out there making a really good effort in offering you a handy and more affordable NAS unit is Thecus. We armed the N2810 with new (non-public) Beta ThecusOS 7.0 firmware and get a massively updated GUI in return. So yes, we are testing a unit priced competitively against the big guns in the industry like Qnap, Synology and Netgear. We went blank into this review as we had never tested their Linux version before, but armed with very good hardware and an excellent software suite the NAS is not only a fast file server, it's loaded with applications and media functionality as well. Today's tested NAS unit model has two swappable HDD bays, full RAID functionality, Gigabit Ethernet, USB (2.0/3.0) and then a heap of software functionality that blows you away completely. I mean this puppy can download torrents, has an FTP server, a MySQL server, a WWW server and well, anything with the word 'server' mentioned in it. It's compatible with major OSes including APPs you can use on your smart-phone, all combined with user and group based management, yeah, a proper NAS. As you will observe, the Thecus N2810 is the little brother of the Thecus N5810 and N5810 PRO.

The Thecus N2810 has an implausible amount of tricks in it, from file-sharing, to usenet or torrent downloading, towards being a fully fledged CMS server, hey man -- whatever you need is served and it's doing so with an Intel Celeron N3050 dual-core CPU based box and a standard 2GB of memory. Power consumption sits at under 10 Watts with one HDD. 

So yeah, have a peek and then let's head into the review.