Thecus N2200 2TB review

Thecus’ N2200 looks rather retro with its curvy metal case and the transparent push-open doors covering the two disk bays. Accessing the bays to remove the slide out disk trays is therefore very easy and the only screws involved are those necessary to attach the disks to the trays. The model we saw came with two 1TB SATA hard disks, although a barebones version without any disks is available for £150.

Both RAID 0 and 1 are supported and the discovery utility prompts you to choose one during initial setup. Configuring the N2200 using the web management interface is easy enough, but there’s room for improvement. The cluttered interface often feels sluggish and various controls are confusingly labelled or poorly translated.

The controls for creating user accounts, organising them into groups and granting them access to shared folders are split between three different screens. This isn’t very efficient if you have lots of users and folders to manage. It’s possible to automate the creation of large numbers of user accounts, but doing so involves using text configuration files which isn’t as user friendly as we’d like.

Once set up, the N2200 works reasonably well but some of its features need polishing. We had no trouble using it as an iTunes music server. It can also back up the contents of a USB disk plugged into the front USB port or simply share the contents of the disk across the network. It refused to work as a printer server though, failing to recognise both our Samsung laser and Epson inkjet. Although it didn’t have any trouble streaming videos and music to a network media player, it refused to stream the same files to a PC running Windows Media Player.

Files stored on the N2200 can also be accessed remotely over the internet using FTP. A timer allows you to schedule when the device will power itself on and off, with different times for different days if you prefer.

The N2200 wasn’t as fast at copying files as we would have liked for a NAS at this price, especially when transferring small files, but it’s still reasonably quick. Its RAID 1 performance closely matched its RAID 0 speeds and was in some cases quicker, so there’s no penalty if you opt for the security of RAID 1. When configured as RAID 0, large files were written at 15.8MB/s and read at just under 26MB/s. Small files were written at a sluggish 6MB/s and read at just over 7MB/s. When configured as RAID 1, large files were written at 17.3MB/s and read at 24.8MB/s. Small files were written at just under 7MB/s but read at a faster 12.2MB/s.

We liked the easily accessible disk bays on Thecus’ N2200, but some of its features are underdeveloped or buggy, while its performance is disappointing for a NAS that costs this much. At 19p per gigabyte, it’s not especially good value. If you’re nonetheless still tempted and can put up with its flaws, you’d be better off buying the barebones version and fitting two 1TB disks at a cost of around £60 each – this would save you around £100.