Thecus updates its line

THECUS HAD SEVERAL new models on display last week, most of which will be familiar to people who know the company.

The N4100 and the N5200 both receive major CPU facelifts, and are joined by the all new N3200.

The N3200 is the baby brother of the N4100, but it looks more like a N5200 because of the LCD. It is a 3 drive bay version that will do RAID 0, 1, 5 and JBOD, and will stream media to Itunes and various other media devices. Sadly, the DLNA DRM infections have spread to Thecus.

It has an eSATA connection, two USB ports and 2 Gigabit RJ-45 ports. This is a major step up over the N4100, it only had 100Mb connections. There is also a slot or upgrading, but no word on what will come out for that yet.

Powering all of this is a Freescale CPU. This should give it considerably more power than the original N4100 and eliminate some of the lag that you see there with large directories.

The N4100 is now the N4100+, but it looks exactly the same. There are two major changes, GigE ports instead of 100Mb on the non-plus and an Intel IOP processor. These address my two major problems with the N4100, it needed more network and more CPU.

The N4100 was great for it's time, but now the refresh brings it right back in to the thick of things. Sadly, the DLNA infection hits here too, I just wish someone would make a cool product with DRM.

Last up comes the N5200 Pro. The N5200 was just fine the way it was, but Thecus did more or less the same thing it did to the N4100, more CPU and more memory. It now has a Celeron M at 1.5GHz and 512M of DDR allowing it to pull many more tricks.

The new features are being an iSCSI device and it supports multiple RAIDs per device. This means you can have raid 0 and 5 at the same time, not just two partitions. I don't really see all that much use for this, but it could come in handy if you need it.

In general, Thecus upped the CPU power on their boxes, and added features to make use of it. The only problems I had with the N4100 and N5200 look to have been addressed fully. They look like good boxes, now if only they had an eight drive variant. µ