Thecus N2100 review
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 27 Apr 2006

Did you ever use NAS (Network Attached Storage) device? If you did, you know that this concept is pretty cool and largely used all over the world. If you didn't, maybe this will come as a surprise to you, but having a dedicated device that handles only your storage is a pretty good idea. It's much easier that way, always knowing where your stuff is - for maintenance, growth and everything. Well, this is the world N2100 is coming from. As this is a NAS device with two hard drive bays, we installed a couple of Seagate's 160 GB Serial ATA drives (this is Serial ATA-only device) and (ab)used it for a couple of weeks. The mechanism used to attach the Serial ATA drives is really good - you just plug them in and then use the screws. It's really tight and very precise, but there's no way you'll ever miss how to do it...

The package with N2100 is really, really small - or, to put it this way - N2100 is really small. The size is some 160x85x200mm, so it's smaller then the smallest barebone PC's. When I come to think about it, I could probably have hundreds of TB's of space with Thecus's devices, without them using a lot of space. But don't think that just because of that you'll get boiled in your system room. From what I can tell, this device runs dead cold (although you have only one fan), and it's been running like that for more then two weeks now. The CPU (Intel IOP 80219) really doesn't heat so you're pretty much safe.