Introduction

In 2009 TweakTown reviewed an average of one NAS product per month. Most of the products that we tested were from the two biggest names in the NAS server market, QNAP and Thecus. In 2010 TweakTown will continue to review NAS servers and the first two months have brought us a plethora of new products from Thecus, QNAP, Proware, Patriot, Advanced Industrial Computer (AIC) and a few others with products on the way. It is safe to say that our NAS server reviews have started to gain some attention with this market.

Testing NAS servers is a complicated and time consuming task. For the most part modern NAS products are computers in their own right with some using Intel Core2 Duo processors with 4GB of RAM. When writing a NAS review it is easy to focus on the hardware and capabilities, but often the software, applications and setup functionality take a back seat even though these functions are in many cases just as important as the hardware used.

To help ease the strain on both the reader and the writer, today we are going to cover the latest firmware / software release from Thecus. In a couple of days we will also publish a similar article covering the QNAP firmware / software since these are the two companies that send us a sample every other month and also have such extensive software. We plan to keep these available as living documents with updates published throughout the coming years.

Software Version 3.00.08b

The current software release from Thecus is the 3.00.08b and that is what we will be looking at today.