Thecus N4800 review

The N4800 has a good complement of I/O ports too. The front panel has two USB3 ports and the rear has two USB2 ports, an eSATA port, two Ethernet ports and, unusually, VGA and HDMI outputs. This means that you can simply plug in a mouse and keyboard and connect the NAS to a screen to control it directly. You can even use it to watch videos or browse the web, but it doesn’t have the wide-ranging format support required to make it a full-time alternative to a media centre PC or media streamer. The NAS even comes with a battery, so you don’t need to connect it to a UPS to protect it from local power failures.

The N4800 has one of the best interfaces we’ve ever seen on a NAS device. When you log in as an administrator, you’re presented with a range of shortcuts to key features, made immediately accessible by large, friendly icons. These include RAID management, file sharing, a number of status monitoring tools and configuration options for iTunes and FTP servers. There are many more options available too, and they can be accessed from a tabbed navigation pane. These include detailed scheduling options that turn the N4800 on and off at designated times, routing functions for the WAN and LAN connections and the ability to configure iSCSI and backup targets.

As is common with high-end NAS devices, you can also install extra applications, including an IP camera control and monitoring interface, but the N4800 doesn’t have as many apps as its rivals, such as the Synology DS212+. The N4800 is blisteringly fast, however, and it averaged of 93MB/s in RAID 0 and 76.1MB/s in RAID 1 pairs during our large file transfer test. The small file transfer test results were also faster than most, giving an average transfer rate of 17.8MB/s when configured as RAID 0 and 15.3MB/s when configured as RAID 1.

This is a brilliantly flexible, powerful and fast NAS, and we loved the ability to connect a monitor and keyboard to access its interface directly. It is very expensive, though, having a £472 price that puts it firmly in the realm of business users and only the most dedicated of media hoarders. The Thecus N4800 deservedly wins an Ultimate award.