Thecus N4810 NAS review

Networking 64 Page 6 of 16 Published by

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Software installation

Software installation

After you start up this NAS you'd expect it to pick up a DHCP lease within your network. E.g. your router should assign an IP to the NAS to bind it into your local LAN network. This is not the case unless you hover in the 192.168.1.x subnet. Our networks (and most others) are to be found in the 192.168.0.x or 10.0.0.x area, the Thecus NAS comes configured with a static IP at 192.168.1.1 which is in another sub-net, and therefore it cannot be reached or accessed. 

If you cannot find the unit with FING or anything, please do download and use the Thecus setup wizard which will detect the unit and allow you to configure it for your specific and/or preferred LAN IP. 


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So again, with a DHCP lease, normally you type in the IP in your browser and start configuring. However, to access the NAS for setup, we'll need to revert to a utility (Thecus setup wizard installer) that Thecus delivers with their NAS units (available for download on their website as well). Just start it up and you will see your NAS listed as above. After you login with the default admin/admin name/pass (change that!) you can assign an IP or, select DHCP after which your router will assign it one. Here you can also alter DNS lookup servers. Thecus conveniently points to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, both owned by Google and always online. Once you've finished the wizard your NAS is ready to be accessed.

We type in our new IP and now can access the NAS. A wizard starts to set up the unit. After installing your HDD(s), giving the unit power, connecting it to the Ethernet and powering it up, after a minute the HDD LEDs will light up and you'll hear a series of beeps. The device is ready for setup. 

Should there be a new firmware available - you should always update with the update function. The firmware will automatically download and install, a process that takes merely a minute or so.

ALWAYS update your firmware to the latest revision when an update is ready. These updates not only introduce new software, they apply security and vulnerability fixes as well. Especially if you plan to make your NAS publicly available though http / ssh / mysql or FTP then always update. Once your NAS has installed the firmware and has rebooted it will continue in your browser. If not, type in the NAS IP again.

 

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We now choose the wizard setup, insert a NAS unit name and password, and from there on you can follow a simple wizard to set up your device and configure it in your network.
 

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In the initial system initialization you will be asked to set up your storage units / array. You'll have plenty to choose from, we test with an SSD to be able to stress the file-system to the maximum, yet also properly measure the capable throughput of the NAS unit.
  

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Nice to see is that we can opt for multiple file-systems, the always popular EXT3/EXT4 system, XFS and Btrfs are supported as well. Btrfs is interesting yet will be slower opposed to to XFS and EXT4. But hey, choices are good, right? If in doubt, EXT4 is your most sensible choice to make.
  

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We'll only test with one fast SSD, so we'll create a JBOD and leave RAID for what it is. However, you can go with a RAID array of your choice (and JBOD which allows you to add more HDDs as you go). With RAID you can stripe and mirror or combine that.

RAID these days mostly is about redundancy so that if an HDD fails, a hot-spare or replacement hotswap HDD could kick in and you can rebuild your array without data-loss (if you're lucky).

Once the NAS goes through the setup initialization stages we can log in based on the admin login password we just inserted. Small tip in advance, should you like to have your public web-content and, say, FTP available on the internet, then in the router setup open up TCP ports 80 and 21 for your NAS IP 192.168.0.xxx / 10.0.0.xxx after which your router will redirect all in- and outgoing requests to the assigned IP. But again, make sure you've downloaded and updated to the latest available firmware for security reasons.

 

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Once the automated setup is complete the unit will log in to the admin interface, and there you have it... ThecusOS 7.0. Thecus was in for a long awaited upgrade in comparison to the competition. It looks good, feels good and the core functionality is rock solid. Hey, it even smells good man.

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