A Cheap NAS for Photography: Thecus N2310

In this episode, I review the interesting NAS Thecus N2310 as a Photography backup storage solution. This all started nearly 6 months after i published the article Drobo is mine – What’s your backup strategy?. The computer storage specialist Thecus contacted me to review one of their product which had been released earlier in the year. I was quite interested and the rest is now history.

The Thecus N2310

It is a Network Attached Storage unit which as its name implies, seats on your network and offer you some storage capabilities as well as some other features such as web and media server… This NAS can take up to 2 standard hard drives. Click on the images to make them bigger. {djmedia 66}

The Conclusion

Pros:

• Cheap (£100 without disk).
• Fast enough to be used as the primary location for your media files to be played or edited.
• Idiot proof disk rail (easy to insert a disk in).
• Attractive and sober design.
• Quick 5min setup.
• Great little app to scan the network for all the online Thecus NAS.
• Great variety of 3rd party applications that can run from/on the NAS.
• Ability to schedule power on-off (days and time)
• Great to have 2 USB (2&3) sockets in addition to the Gigabit Ethernet.

Cons:

• Quite noisy (fan + disk).
• USB Copy button does not work.
• Web Based Admin console instead of a native client.
• Admin console not so novice friendly.
• Poor of resilience when one disk fails while media is being used (test with playing a video which hung when I pulled one of the drives).
• Slow Recovery mode (after the above test, it took 2 hours to recover 2x1Tb drive).

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