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I recently won the Thecus N2200 and WD RE4 2TB hard drives (right here on these forums). Thank you so much to TweakTown, Thecus, and Western Digitial. I want to share my experience with folks here, and will do that over a few posts.
In my first post, I want to talk about first impressions, and I will include some photos.
I'll mention the WD drives first. There isn't much to say about first impressions with hard drives these days. I guess the most remarkable thing is how much each 2TB drive weighs (1.66 lbs each). Once installed in the N2200, the combined weight was impressive.
The N2200 was well packaged, and shipped with power cord, ethernet cable, software, and the usual collection of quick setup guide, warranty cards, and whatnot. There are two push-to-open doors covering the hard drive trays. The hard drive trays themselves lock into place and support both 2.5" and 3.5" drives. The enclosure has a well-constructed feel to it.
I screwed the drives into the trays, slid the trays into the enclosure, connected the cables, and started up the N2200. There are LED's on the front of the unit which indicate network and drive activity, and drive failures. Unfortunately, the LED's are behind a plastic cover that allows a considerable amount of light to bleed through, so even when all the activity/notification lights are off, the light from the power LED gives the impression that the lights are on.
Next up was reviewing the setup procedure. This part of the process I did find frustrating. You must install the included software to configure the N2200 the first time. I say "the first time" because once it's running, you can just go to the assigned IP address of the unit to change the configuration. I ran into issues with the software on my primary computer not being able to discover the N2200. I could see from the router that an IP address had been assigned (it automatically configures itself for DHCP and gives itself the name N2200 on the network), and I could ping the address, but the included software just couldn't see it to configure it, nor could I use a web browser to connect to that address.
I installed the software on a secondary computer and it successfully detected the device, and I was able to proceed with the setup. The setup procedure involves detecting the N2200, detecting the drives, and choosing the configuration (single drive, RAID0, RAID1, JBOD). I chose RAID1 and continued.
The setup process also tries to automatically create a bunch of network shares on the computer. I wasn't able to modify the shares at all, but thankfully I was able to simply exit out of the setup utility at that point. From there, I was able to access the N2200 by its assigned IP address and use my web browser to modify various settings.
The web interface is Flash based. That came as a bit of a surprise. I do find it somewhat amusing that Thecus goes to great lengths to create software (both the setup software and the Flash-based web configuration software) easy enough to be used by people that likely have no idea what FTP is, let alone DLNA, SMB/CIFS, NFS, and uPnP. In my opinion, if the user understands what those protocols/technologies are, then the user should be at least experienced enough to navigate to an IP address to configure the N2200 from the start and map their own drives once done.
It was pretty late by the time I got everything configured, so I haven't had a chance to really play around with many of the configuration options just yet. The final thing I want to comment on here is that the web interface is very slow. I can tell that I had better get used to seeing the words "Please wait". I believe that a non-Flash based interface would have been a much better idea, and cost Thecus a lot less in development as well.
To sum up the first impressions, the N2200 seems like a good, solid piece of hardware with some great features that is the victim of a software developer with too much time on his or her hands.
In my first post, I want to talk about first impressions, and I will include some photos.
I'll mention the WD drives first. There isn't much to say about first impressions with hard drives these days. I guess the most remarkable thing is how much each 2TB drive weighs (1.66 lbs each). Once installed in the N2200, the combined weight was impressive.
The N2200 was well packaged, and shipped with power cord, ethernet cable, software, and the usual collection of quick setup guide, warranty cards, and whatnot. There are two push-to-open doors covering the hard drive trays. The hard drive trays themselves lock into place and support both 2.5" and 3.5" drives. The enclosure has a well-constructed feel to it.
I screwed the drives into the trays, slid the trays into the enclosure, connected the cables, and started up the N2200. There are LED's on the front of the unit which indicate network and drive activity, and drive failures. Unfortunately, the LED's are behind a plastic cover that allows a considerable amount of light to bleed through, so even when all the activity/notification lights are off, the light from the power LED gives the impression that the lights are on.
Next up was reviewing the setup procedure. This part of the process I did find frustrating. You must install the included software to configure the N2200 the first time. I say "the first time" because once it's running, you can just go to the assigned IP address of the unit to change the configuration. I ran into issues with the software on my primary computer not being able to discover the N2200. I could see from the router that an IP address had been assigned (it automatically configures itself for DHCP and gives itself the name N2200 on the network), and I could ping the address, but the included software just couldn't see it to configure it, nor could I use a web browser to connect to that address.
I installed the software on a secondary computer and it successfully detected the device, and I was able to proceed with the setup. The setup procedure involves detecting the N2200, detecting the drives, and choosing the configuration (single drive, RAID0, RAID1, JBOD). I chose RAID1 and continued.
The setup process also tries to automatically create a bunch of network shares on the computer. I wasn't able to modify the shares at all, but thankfully I was able to simply exit out of the setup utility at that point. From there, I was able to access the N2200 by its assigned IP address and use my web browser to modify various settings.
The web interface is Flash based. That came as a bit of a surprise. I do find it somewhat amusing that Thecus goes to great lengths to create software (both the setup software and the Flash-based web configuration software) easy enough to be used by people that likely have no idea what FTP is, let alone DLNA, SMB/CIFS, NFS, and uPnP. In my opinion, if the user understands what those protocols/technologies are, then the user should be at least experienced enough to navigate to an IP address to configure the N2200 from the start and map their own drives once done.
It was pretty late by the time I got everything configured, so I haven't had a chance to really play around with many of the configuration options just yet. The final thing I want to comment on here is that the web interface is very slow. I can tell that I had better get used to seeing the words "Please wait". I believe that a non-Flash based interface would have been a much better idea, and cost Thecus a lot less in development as well.
To sum up the first impressions, the N2200 seems like a good, solid piece of hardware with some great features that is the victim of a software developer with too much time on his or her hands.
) buy something that just might be a good match for a pair of fast drives. I decided to try out the Mediasonic HUR1-SU3S2 USB 3.0 / eSATA RAID enclosure. Now I haven't been able to run a full suite of benchmarks on this setup, but I believe the quick set of benchmarks from CrystalDiskMark below should paint a fairly decent picture.
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