Specifications, Availability and Pricing

If there was ever a way to backup my previous statements about bringing the enterprise into the home, the above list of specifications is it. In short the Thecus N4100PRO is a four drive storage appliance that when run in RAID 5 will protect you from a single hard drive failure. When using RAID 6 or 10 you are immune from data loss if two disks fail.

Business users and parents will be glad to find that you can setup users and groups to block off certain directories. This will allow mommy and daddy to keep things like tax documents under lock and key.

Several of the software features will be covered in the software portion of this review a little later on.

Thecus has several e-tail and retail partners including Newegg. The Egg was sold out of the N4100PRO at the time of writing, but I was able to find several companies listing it on Pricewatch. The best price I spotted was 399.00 USD with free shipping in the US. Once you factor in four 1TB drives at just a hair under 100 each, the whole system can be up and running for 800 Dollars. There is always the 1.5TB drive route; Seagate's 1.5TB drives cost only 30 Dollars more than the 1TB drives.

On the other hand, some may just want their NAS to grow with their needs. You can purchase two drives for RAID 1 then add a third drive when you need more space, moving the system over to RAID 5. The next logical step would be to add a fourth drive to the RAID 5 array. This way you remain protected at all times form a hard disk failure.