The Thecus NAS server N4100+ is announced as the “original 4-bay NAS solution completely revamped”, and after using a N5200 for the office we got a N4100+ as a second, “smaller” NAS box, as we didn’t have requirements for the RAID6 on that one.

Instead we ordered four 750 GB SATA2 Seagate drives to be installed in this case.

For a product price of EUR 599 ( almost 800 bush bucks) we got

• a shrink wrapped device with a CD that was EMPTY. If you recently bought hardware you know that not even printed manuals are shipped with most hardware… and of course the CD contains setup software and module … it took the distributor FOUR days and multiple phonecalls to the sale manager, RMA tech, etc from my colleague Tom and me to get that damn CD
• after setting it up finally (and 12+ hours of formatting of the RAID5) we had a NAS box on a GigabitLAN that did 2-3 Mbit

Yes, around 3-4 Megabit per second read/write to latest Disk Array hardware that’s even “completely revamped”

Also others have carefully asked about the “performance” of 5 Mbit/sec…

Now I don’t know about the network infrastructure in Taiwan where THECUS is originated and built this device with their

But even our small office here in Vienna has a 12 Mbit broadband.

So my internet connection is THREE TIMES faster than the “completely revamped” local storage solution?

Are you nuts Thecus?

Luckily I know this MUST be a defect as we got the N5200 device here for months as comparison.

We can do 60-70 mbit/sec to the N5200, with similar disks,

which is absolute proof that the N4100+ is defect by design – or at least by shipment.

As it seems to me today, this N4100+ model is the biggest waste of money one could imagine and I really hope Thecus will be delivering a

Bios Flash in the next 48 hours, else I’ll send this back to the distributor to get our money back

What’s worse is that

• the shrink wrapped box contained a CD that was empty, so we had to wait 4 full days to setup the box finally…
• the homepage of Thecus does NOT contain any bios updates, FAQs or “tricks” to unlock this network brake
• this sluggish performance even effects your LAN as the SMB share detection is extremely slowed down
• the CPU display of the N4100 shows 100% when copying some media files to it…

100% CPU for calculating the RAID5 checksums of ONE file being transfered from ONE user?

Now that has nothing to do with needs of individuals and large organizations alike.

This just smells “scam” and I urge you to refrain from ordering this crap just to RMA it back.

Update: Thecus wrote back to my complains

So Thecus frankly says, that if you are looking for a NAS box that performs, you should NOT buy the 4100+

because only if one is lucky he might get a bit of performance out of it end of September… what a joke!

BTW – the “Disk Imaging Software” announced neither was on the CD for this product, so again this is “announcement ware”