Software Features

We look at several NAS servers a year and it is our opinion that Thecus has fallen behind in the secondary software race. The announcement in May about the new SDK has already given Thecus a boost in software features and they are now quickly growing their module library.

Thecus has a firm grip on the base modules that provide the most heavily used and relied on features. For most users these are the important features and they could really care less if three different Torrent modules are available because they are not going to use any Torrent modules at all. In many ways the software feature race has gotten a little out of hand, but then again, the more features you can pack into a NAS the less you need other servers to run.

One area that Thecus does very well in that we rarely talk about and that you will not find on a spec sheet is compatibility. To date we've yet to run across a drive that doesn't work in their systems. Thecus keeps a list of compatible drives on their website and a list of some that do cause issues, but we've yet to run into a drive from our collect that's caused problems.

This extends to solid state drives as well. I prefer to test with SSDs since they cut RAID 5 and 6 format time to around an hour compared to the 20 and 25 hours it takes with 7,200 RPM platter drives. The same cannot be said about the nearest competition which has several issues with nearly all of our SSDs.