Thecus N4310 Review

Performance Analysis

There's plenty to talk about these days with NAS enclosures in terms of performance and not just with raw throughput either. The N4310 does sport Plex Media Server support, however, as most Plex users will have gathered, the CPU in this case just isn't up to on-the-fly transcoding. For example, dishing out a 1080p DivX video file to an iPhone saw the N4310 stop dead in its tracks, with no output even after waiting for several minutes. Our Core i3-powered HTPC offered near instant streaming for the same file so you'll need to make sure all your files are in the correct formats to begin with if you intend to stream them from the N4310 to mobile devices.


The speed test results using Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit with the N4310 in the default RAID 5 mode, were pretty much as expected too, although the single core CPU did perform better than we'd anticipated, usually matching or not coming too far away from our benchmark Synology DS215j. There were a couple of hiccups, however, with a particularly slow write speed in the directory copy and file copy tests and it was over 10 percent slower in the HD playback and record test too. Clearly, then, the CPU isn't packing much of a punch, but it's enough to get the job done. Switching RAID modes or rebuilding arrays, though, was a miserable process due to the hideously slow build time.

Power consumption was frugal, with the N4310 drawing just 31W under load, dipping to around 25W at idle. In terms of noise the fan is actually relatively quiet, even when under load or creating RAID arrays - something we proved by manually stopping it. The main noise, which is quite noticeable, is simply the hard disks. The chassis is fairly simple and rather tinny and this helps to amplify the noise produced by four hard disks chugging away inside. Needless to say, you'll want to hide the N4310 away if you intend to have it in the same room as your TV.

Conclusion

While it's unlikely any of the N4310's competitors with their dual-core CPUs will manage on-the-fly video transcoding in Plex, it's highly likely they'll perform noticeably better in other areas. For example, Synology's DS215j was noticeably faster in most of our new suite of tests and if you're a heavy user that regularly transfers lots of data, the Thecus N4310 will probably slow you down. We can't say this categorically, though, as we haven't tested QNAP or Synology's four-bay models yet.

However, there's also the matter of the OS. It's not dire but it's certainly far less pleasant to use than either of the aforementioned companies' efforts and rebuilding RAID arrays takes an absolute age. The selection of apps is better than your average external hard disk and certainly some of the cheaper NAS enclosures but again, Thecus falls behind the competition here. In summary, the N4310 is very competitive price-wise but falls short in a few areas, namely the OS, available apps and speed.