Thecus N2310 Budget 2-bay NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on July 6, 2014 2:30 PM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- AppliedMicro
- Thecus
Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
Before proceeding to the business end of the review, we take a small detour to analyze the miscellaneous aspects of the Thecus N2310. The unit comes along with a backup software on the CD that simplifies setting up periodical backup tasks to the NAS for Windows users. The NAS has Apple Time Machine support for users with Mac systems. The other praiseworthy aspect is the T-OnTheGo mobile app (for both iOS and Android). With WebDAV enabled in the NAS, it makes it easy to have access to the NAS files through either the local network or the Internet. We already gave it lot of praise in our review of the N2560, and the behaviour with the N2310 is no different. As already mentioned, the Plex app also enables media server features. Adding to the positive aspects is the excellent performance in terms of data transfer rates (given the price and the platform).
The power consumption of the unit under various scenarios and the RAID rebuild time (for the one applicable case - RAID 1 reconstruction) are provided in the table below. These numbers were obtained while using the 4 TB WD Re disks.
| Thecus N2310 RAID Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power Consumption |
| Idle (Disks Spun Down) | 5.02 W | |
| 4TB JBOD Initialization (Single Disk) | 14.14 W | |
| 4TB RAID-1 Rebuild (Replace 1 of 2 Disks) | 12h 41m 25s | 25.80 W |
The unit has a MSRP of $150. At that price point, the main competitor is the Synology DS214se. The latter has only 256 MB of RAM (compared to the 512 MB in the N2310). So, on the whole, Thecus is really targeting this unit at the entry level folks by pushing down the price quite a bit while providing better specifications on paper. Though we haven't reviewed the DS214se, we have enough faith in Synology's OS and efforts to believe that the unit would have completed our benchmarking suite without any problems. Our issue with the N2310 lies in that aspect.
We found the street price to be much lower ($134 on Amazon and $126 on Newegg as of review date). At that price point, readers may also begin to consider the sub-$100 2-bay offerings (such as those from ZyXEL) that appear regularly on the deal sites.
The consumer NAS segment is growing at a fast clip, and vendors such as Synology and QNAP have a very attractive and stable user interface / user experience. If Thecus wants to stay relevant in this market segment, they should concentrate more on just price alone. The entire firmware (starting with the kernel version - even Western Digital, a relative newcomer to this market segment, uses a more recent version) needs overhauling to improve stability and performance. The lesser said about the UI, the better. The Thecus N2310 will probably work well as a basic entry-level or backup NAS. However, given our benchmarking travails, we will let our readers be the judge on applicability under other scenarios.
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poohbear - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
i thought this was an enthusiast site? why write reviews of average hardware like this? still waiting for your Haswell refresh devil canyon review....jabber - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
It is an enthusiast site but in order to survive on the web you have to appeal to more than 200 people. Plus some of us enthusiasts just want a simple cheap solution as we don't have the time or requirement to spend $1000 on fifteen individual components when one $150 box will do the job. Even for enthusiasts 'good enough' is just fine.vol7ron - Tuesday, July 8, 2014 - link
True enthusiasts don't discriminate on price. They like to be informed about the whole range of products. What good is looking at the best if you can't compare it to mediocre? Besides we are enthused by technology as a whole.Not to mention, AT hardly ever reviews the absolute best, which is often some expensive hardware you probably have never heard of and only a limited few would be able to afford. Instead, they target popular, prosumer products that are available to the masses for a reasonably affordable price. These products are often from popular brands which have a decent reputation. You don't see them reviewing quantum computers or SSDs with ridiculous amount of throughput.
PEJUman - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I can't help but wonder why the average geek would pick this instead of old PC/kaveri/low power sandy desktop?I have a 4gb kaveri n mobo that cost me $200 without a case, it is a 8 sata, 4x usb 3 with gigabit, WiFi and VM support, not to mention expandable pci-e
I built a cheap file server with old license of vista/7 pro. Using a primocache as initial line of defense for home use I/O spikes, I was able to use this thing as file server, media center, Plex server, torrent/VPN simultaneously, in a pinch I can do real work on it as well.
So my question is, yes in vacuum these 2-4 bays nas boxes are cheap.
But if one consider what he/she have around the house, homebrew windows with cheap caching (Intel SRT/primocache/nvelo/samsung rapid)
PEJUman - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
The PC route is not that much more expensive, but infinitely more configureable and repairs are more dependable/possible.Note: I am a geek, asking the elder geeks, on what benefit (for geeks, not layman) am I not seeing on these Nas?
ganeshts - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
Do you have the capability to access data outside your home with a nice mobile interface (both Android / iOS devices)?I used to think along the same directions as you a couple of years back. However, with the increasingly mobile lifestyle and social sharing culture, these sort of 'appliances' are geared towards getting something working without hassle while providing features to enable the upcoming consumer behaviour (access data on the go with a pleasant and easy-to-use UI, easily generate links for files in the NAS to send to friends/family etc.).
There are certain things that a PC does well, but we are now at a stage where even geeks can be well-served with an off-the-shelf NAS appliance for many aspects.
DanNeely - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
Would adding a "advantages of buying pre-built" page to the reviews cut down on the flood of this type of comment on every NAS review on this site; or would the people who do it continue to do so because they don't bother to read the article before commenting?PEJUman - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
Dan, I can read well enough to realize my homebrew nas that took <2 hrs to configure (from bare install to up and running server) can wipe the floor with N2310 or others at this bracket on 5 user simultaneous access.the question is aimed at a geek level, was hoping that i missed something such as: network QoS improvement, small file I/O with Raid 1, automatic bandwidth balancing of JBOD, etc
My comment was meant to be constructive, and I even clued you before I start. yours on the other hand...
Beany2013 - Tuesday, July 8, 2014 - link
Thing is, when we're talking about homebrew stuff vs NAS appliances, we're talking different classes of the same category of device here - I have a syno 214+ and I could wipe it, throw it at my dad (who is technically minded but not a geek) and he could have it set up within an hour.I could also throw a Kaveri mobo at him, a fistful of disk, RAM and an OS install disk, and it'd take him days to sort it out. I used to that sort of thing semi-regularly, but the *good* devices (primarily from QNAP and Syno) are just too well priced to ignore for what they do these days.
This sort of review isn't just for 'us' - it's for the people we know who don't want to be splicing up two power supplies to feed fifteen disk drives in a single chassis, and who don't want to be worrying about cooling requirements and airflow. But who always ask us what to buy (and often, to set it up for them)
So now we know, if your father/uncle/second cousin twice removed asks about one of these NAS things, and says they've seen these cheapy Thecus things, to ward them off it. You could build them one if you want, but then you support it for life.
Also, as I've said here before, I'm considered to be an extreme tech nerd even among my sysadmin/sysop cohorts (I don't see it meself...) - and even *I* can't be arsed dicking with this stuff when I get home from a day of setting up load balanced routers and hacking up ATX12v cables to power a SAS backplane from a dead rack server. Don't worry, you'll get old and lazy too one day ;-) and then you'll learn the value of just throwing a bit more money at the problem (but it's getting cheaper all the time) so you don't have to mess about with this crap! And trust me, that day *will* come.
Steven Raith.
PS: Incidentally, have you set up your Windows rig to do iSCSI LUNs? I never did find a decent iSCSI server for Windows that wasn't a ballache to set up (although it has been a few years since I looked) - the Syno one is nice and easy. And does NFS too, which is nice. And iTunes server, torrent client, *good* CCTV server, etc....all out of the box. Saves a lot of time...
tuxRoller - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
You can run owncloud and access your data from a nice GUI.That's what I use instead of Dropbox, plus it has integrated libre office support (which I haven't used).