Thecus N4810 NAS review - Introduction

Thecus N4810 Multimedia NAS server
Truly proper Network Attached Storage with quad-core processor and 4 GB of memory

Today we look at the new Thecus N4810, a Linux based NAS unit that is price competitive while offering great performance. The four bay beast is now fitted with a quad-core Intel Celeron processor and has received an upgrade to 4GB of system memory, with the ability to upgrade. 4GB / 4 HDD trays / four CPU cores and a N4810 product -- it all makes sense, trust us.

This NAS server is seriously impressive as it comes with newly updated ThecusOS (Linux) software. Armed with low power consumption the unit can be used as a media player as well, as it is capable of 1080p and even Ultra HD accelerated media playback. Yes, this NAS comes with an HDMI out and even a DisplayPort connector - just start up XBMC slash Kodi and you'll four core have HTPC galore.

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. The quad-core based N4810 runs ThecusOS 7.0 firmware that offers a proper GUI and software feature set in return. We will be testing this unit against the competitively priced big guns in the industry like Qnap, Synology and Netgear. 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 four swappable HDD bays and an internal cache SSD connector as well, full RAID functionality, 2x Gigabit Ethernet (which can be Link Aggregated), USB 3.0 and then a heap of software functionality that is bound to impress. You can hook up the device as just a UPnP server, but extend as much as you want to as this is a download server, FTP server, a MySQL server, a WWW server and well, anything with the word 'server' mentioned in it. For your more regular file access the unit is compatible with major OSes, all user and group management based of course.

The Thecus N4810 has a great deal of functionality, from file-sharing, to usenet or torrent downloading, towards being a fully fledged CMS server, whatever you need is served and it's doing so with an Intel Celeron N3160 quad core based processor and a proper 4GB of memory. Power consumption sits at roughly 10 Watts with one HDD. 

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