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NetworkGuy
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Post subject: Thecus N3200 Review by CNET
 Posted: Sep 09, 2008 - 03:26 PM CST
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Joined: Apr 18, 2005
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The strongest point of the Thecus N3200 is its ability to support the most popular RAID formats including RAID 0 (striped), RAID 1 (mirror), RAID 5 (striped with distributed parity), and JBOB. You can find out more about RAID here, however, RAID 5 is the preferred setup that allows for a good balance of data storage space, performance, and data protection. RAID 5 requires at least three hard drives and this is what the N3200 beats other NAS devices of the same price. The N3200 supports three 3.5-inch SATA hard drives of up to 1TB each.
The N3200 features FTP, iTunes, and UPnP servers, and they worked very well in our tests. You can't set up the interval that dictates how often the device will automatic scan folders for newly added media, however, it seems the device does it very often and we were able to get the newly added media to the share list within a few minutes.
The device also supports both USB and eSATA external hard drives. Once plugged in, the external hard drives will be shared as "USBHDD" and "eSATAHDD." The hard drive needs to be formatted in FAT32 to offer read and write access; NTFS drives can only be read. The N3200 can also copy entire content of a USB thumb drive into its internal hard drive--all you have to do is plug the drive into the front USB port and initiate the command using the navigation buttons and the little LCD.
The N3200 supports up to six USB devices at a time via its two USB ports (you can add more devices by using a USB hub). It can also support a limited number of USB printers, USB Webcams, and USB Wi-Fi adapters. We didn't have any that it supports to try this out. The N3200 worked very well, however, with all external hard drives we tried it with, including three different USB external hard drives and two eSATA external hard drives. All of them were recognized and shared within less than 30 seconds upon being plugged in.
The most interesting and unusual feature that the N3200 offers is called ISO Mount, where you can mount up to 200 ISO 9660-standard files. Once mounted, the content of the ISO files is available to network users from the read-only folder within the shared folder where the ISO file resides. This is a very convenient feature in case you want to access the content of ISO files without having to burn them to CDs. Keeping data in ISO format is also a good way to compress it to save storage space.
Entire review:
http://reviews.cnet.com/external-hard-d ... ecus+N3200 |
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