Initial Setup and Control Panel
Thecus promises a quick setup out of the box with the N2310, and that's exactly what I experienced.
Removal of the drive bay sleds is easy with spring-loaded closures
The drives are securely mounted to the sleds with three screws on each side
A look inside with the drives removed
After installing a pair of 2TB WD Red drives and powering up the NAS for the first time I installed the Thecus software in Windows and ran the first-time setup, which took about 5 minutes to complete.
After creating the RAID (I chose RAID-1) it then prompted for the creation of a Thecus ID. This isn't mandatory but will be required to set up remote access to the NAS using the Thecus DDNS service.
Creation of the ID was simple enough, requiring an email address to send a verification, and after that I was all set with my “Thecus Link” account. This is all you should need to access the NAS remotely through the "T-OnTheGo" app for Android and iOS, as well, and we’ll check out the mobile app later on.
The NAS shows up in the Network folder and can be accessed without any further setup by using the default login provided by Thecus (user:admin, pw:admin).
Administration of the NAS is handled through a browser-based dashboard (located at the N2310's IP address on your network), and this provides access to everything the N2310 is capable of. (By default it’s using the same “admin/admin” login.)
Once logged in you'll see the "Shared Folder" and "RAID" links, and there is a small icon for the Control Panel up in the top left. The first two are self-explanitory, as they give options for editing or creating new folders on the NAS as well as checking the status of the RAID, or creating a new array.
We'll look more closely at the Control Panel here.
There are quite a few options, so here is an expanded view:
That's … a lot of options. This really is a small server, and there are even more options available through 3rd party apps. We'll take a look at some of the N2310's added features on the next page.
Without meaning to be picky,
Without meaning to be picky, are you sure that the contents of the NAS show up on the Apple TV? I researched this quite extensively a few months ago before I purchased an ATV and my conclusion was that NAS type devices could only communicate using DAAP or in other words: iDevices should be fine but ATV still requires a computer or an iDevice to act as a bridge between a NAS and the ATV. The computer approach is annoying from a power consumption point of view & the iDevice bridge approach is terrible if you don’t have much throughput to play with, so if things have changed I might just have to pick one of these units up.
Yep, it Truly works. I have
Yep, it Truly works. I have tested it several times. Works fine with both AppleTV and Chromecast
Oh boy does this make me
Oh boy does this make me cringe. RAID0,1 or JBOD and no ECCRAM is just asking for data-loss or disk corruption. Of course that’s less a criticism of this product and more this class of products, and I’ll grant that $150 isn’t going to buy you those enterprise-class features.
I hope that whoever gets one of these has some other backup solution. I for one have been burned too many times before.
I haven’t seen any mention of
I haven’t seen any mention of this running a ZFS file system. Why would you waste money on ECCRAM for it?
Processor: AMCC APM 86491
Processor: AMCC APM 86491 800Mhz Is that a PowerPC derived part?
On the subject of the Android
On the subject of the Android app not working, at my house for my Zyxel NAS (and a Buffalo before that…) I use ES File Explorer ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.estrongs.android.pop )
Which is free and fantastic!
Is this thing running Linux
Is this thing running Linux or bsd under the hood and if so can you ssh access?
This looks extremely appealing but if I don’t have the power of terminal access it’s almost a non-starter.
Also are they running a hardware raid controller or is it a software implementation like mdadm?