Thecus N4560 4-Bay NAS Review

[news 28]

 

 

<http://www.eteknix.com>

 

Thecus N4560 4-Bay NAS Review

 

Over the last few years, the NAS market as a whole has been growing

at a steady rate and in when we start to break things down and look at

the rate of growth in the individual market sectors, the rate of sales

in the consumer group has seen a far greater growth than any other

market sector. Part of this growth is down to market exposure where

users are seeing far more units on offer through both the retail and

e-tail channels; however the price is a more crucial factor and this

is what is now bringing the NAS concept into the limelight for the

SOHO market. When we go back two to three years and look at the total

cost of ownership; that's the cost of purchasing the NAS itself along

with drives to store data on then with the cost of running the unit

– things were not looking that good and the price of one of a

typical 4-bay system in some instances was easily a four-figure sum of

money – in other words, simply too much of a cost to swallow

considering you could easily buy a set of drives and whack them into

your desktop system for a whole lot less.

 

Since that time, the total cost of ownership has dropped

considerably, with the price per GB of hard disk storage at its best

to date and with NAS products maturing with more and more features,

but for a lower price we are now starting to see the SOHO NAS

ownership numbers grow more and more to the point where if you want to

share a large amount of data between multiple systems, the NAS is

now the go to place for your storage needs.

 

In the latter part of last year I took a look at Thecus' N2560

<http://www.eteknix.com/thecus-n2650-2-bay-nas-review/>

 – a highly affordable system that brought style as well as

substance to the SOHO market with a white plastic chassis and

tool-free installation on the outside and inside one of the first SoC

designs inside which offers a high amount of performance for its size

whilst keeping the power consumption nice and low in the process. The

N4560 that I'm taking a look at today is, as one may see, is an

extension to the new line of affordable systems and alongside the

larger space to accommodate four drives, the N4560 packs an Atom based

SoC to keep the performance at a good level whilst keeping the power

consumption down (although the choice of drive will have an impact on

the total consumption) and to round the package off, we are presented

with a good array of features, but not too many that would flood a

rookie user with options, resulting in a confused experience.

 

URL - http://www.eteknix.com/thecus-n4560-4-bay-nas-review/

 

 

 

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