In Use (continued):

The two screenshots below were taken from areas of the interface where I thought I would install all the apps of interest to the device. Coming from a Synology Diskstation , I was hoping to see an interactive list of cool things I could do with the device beyond storing files. While the list did offer a few things, none were all that exciting. Luckily, this is not all that Thecus has to offer. Visiting the NAS App Center on the Thecus website reveals 'hundreds' of apps available covering a broad range of categories. While many of the titles available on the website do seem interesting, not all of them are compatible with the N2310. This page on the Thecus site shows all that are compatible with the N2310.



Overall, the admin interface lets you manage the device without much fanfare. The interface is not as polished and does not let you do as much as I have grown to expect with other NAS servers, but it is more than adequate for setting up the basics and a bit more.

Thecus doesn't offer a whole suite of mobile apps like you find with a DiskStation, but they do have the T-OnTheGo app available for Android and Apple devices. You can remotely access your files, plus do things like view photos and stream music/videos. It covers the basics, but it does require some configuration work to get up and running, and it is not quite as refined as I expected.

Testing:

Testing in this review will compare the performance of the Thecus N2310 with the recently reviewed Synology Diskstation DS414j and a Windows based server powered by an Intel i3-3245 processor. The server features a 3.4GHz dual core processor, 8GB of memory, and 4x 3TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives connected to a Highpoint RocketRAID PCI Express controller in RAID5. The server uses an integrated Gigabit network adapter and is connected to the same D-Link branded Gigabit switch using a 6-foot CAT6 cable.



The desktop system used to access the Thecus N2310, the Diskstation DS414j, and the Windows server features a 240GB SATA III SSD for the operating system and a 3x 640GB drive RAID5 array for read/writing transferred files. It has an Intel based Gigabit network adapter and is connected via 6-foot CAT6 cable to the same Gigabit switch. All devices were assigned static IP addresses by the network's router.

Power Consumption:

Before looking at transfer speed data, we'll look at just how little power the Thecus N2310 NAS server uses. It was plugged in to a Seasonic Power Angel monitoring device in order to get real time information on the current drawn while in use. The device was tested in two conditions... 1) While the device was active - reading and writing data from two different clients in order to keep the drives spinning, and 2) with the device idle - where it is fully powered up but with no active data transfers. The chart shows a third condition - hibernation - which is a feature of other NAS servers, but apparently not of this one. With hibernation mode, you could command the drives to spin down to save even more power, but I found no such option in the N2310 interface.



What we see is that the N2310 uses just 14W while at idle and jumps up to 28W while active. These values are just about half of what the recently reviewed 4-bay Synology DS414j was able to achieve while idle and active (28W and 43W respectively), but that device had a hibernation mode which let it draw just 7W when not is use. Thecus does let you power off the device on a schedule, but that is not the same thing since it doesn't leave it accessible to the network at all times. Thecus' specifications reference the device drawing just 5W without any drives installed (which seems like a pointless specification) and that it draws about 14W with drives. Our testing confirmed that they are on the money with that value.