Thecus TopTower N6850 review

The interface uses a tabular tree-structure menu in the right-hand pane presents the N6850’s features in a reasonably comprehensible manner. The Home screen presents you with icons that lead to the most commonly required settings and info screens, including an FTP server, the Share Folders (via SMB) settings, RAID management, iSCSI targeting and scheduling for periods during which the NAS should power itself off.

Storage Settings let you view and configure your RAID arrays, iSCSI targets and SMB shared folders. You’ll also find Thecus’s NAS stacking settings here – this option allows you to join together multiple NAS devices configured as iSCSI targets to provide up to 84TB of storage that behaves as a single disk. Below, the NAS’s User and Group Authentication settings are fairly standard, allowing you assign different permissions and quotas to users. You can also mount up to 100 ISO images as virtual discs and make them available across the network.

There’s plenty here, but it’s not as easy to get to grips with as some interfaces

While the backup components aren’t very well described within the GUI, the backup services include one of the few fully fledged wizards on the device. Perversely, this is only triggered when you select the Amazon S3 option. The wizard lets you configure the N6850 to back up to a remotely located NAS device, back itself up to a local device or vice versa or backup to your Amazon S3 cloud storage.

Plenty of modular software components are available from Thecus’s download centre, while others are developed by the user community. Official modules allow you to use the NAS as a webserver, including MySQL, as well as more media orientated services such as image gallery software, a TwonkyMedia DLNA server and both BitTorrent and NZB download clients. There are also several more conventionally business orientated modules, including mail servers, RAID replication, backup schedulers and support for cloud-based storage services such as DropBox. Mobile apps are also available to control, upload and access content on your NAS via Android or iOS.

Unfortunately, both the installation interface and the interfaces of the modules themselves tend to feel sketchy and poorly documented. Everything works as it’s supposed to but, like almost every other elements of the NAS’s interface, modules are inadequately described in broken English. It’s a long way from the glossy interfaces of rivals such as Synology and QNAP.

A key selling point of Thecus’s recent NAS devices is their ability to connect to a keyboard, mouse and HDMI display. Once again, poor documentation makes this far more difficult than it should be. By default, you get command line Linux access, which might be all that’s needed by some sysadmins. However, if you want to use Thecus’s direct multimedia features, you’ll have to spend a while dredging through support forum posts and painfully slow module downloads from Thecus’s website.

Once you have it installed, the Thecus LocalDisplay module is rather neat. It’s a lightweight window manager with large, friendly shortcut icons to launch Firefox and a command line terminal. However, if you want to add a media player or TV tuning app, you still have to download a third-party package distributed by Thecus’s forums. Although the N6850 has enough processor power and memory to play music and movies smoothly, we’re not convinced that anyone’s really going to want to use their business NAS as a clumsy alternative to a cheap HTPC. The LocalDisplay module is useful for administration, though.

The TopTower N6850 is fast, powerful and reasonably priced for a six-bay NAS enclosure, but we weren’t happy with the amount of noise it makes, the confusing and poor use of English in its web interface or the emphasis on user-created modules rather than officially authorised apps to add functionality. As it is, this NAS is a cost-effective option for businesses that need vast amounts of storage, but we can’t recommend wholeheartedly.