Internal Details

There are more internal shots in the slideshow, but I've included a shot of the 3200's board for those of you who like to ogle them. The missing PCI connector would be sitting in the group of holes near the bottom of the board.

Figure 3: N5200 Pro motherboard

The board is powered by a Freescale 8347 @ 400Mhz CPU and has 256 MB of soldered-in RAM and 16 MB of flash. The SATA controller is a Silicon Image SiI3114 - PCI to 4 Port SATA150 and the two gigabit Ethernet ports (supporting 4 and 8K jumbo frames) are via Realtek RTL8211's. There is also a Microchip PIC16F877 8 bit microcontroller.

The drive backplane plugs into the connector at the top left of the photo. The backplane provides blind-mate connection to three 3.5" SATA II drives, which will be formatted using the ext3 filesystem. Drives up to 1 TB are supported (a PDF list of supported drives can be downloaded here).

Features

Given the 3200's home user focus, it's not surprising that Thecus has not included iSCSI support. But they have carried over support for NFS and AFP network file systems and the ISO Mount feature that allows users to mount CDROM ISO images without having to use an actual disk. You also get AD/NT Domain support, which I doubt most home users need.

Most of what the 3200 brings to the party takes the form of multimedia support beyond the Mediabolic UPnP AV server found in the 5200 / PRO. There's an iTunes server (Figure 4), which is disabled by default. But once I copied a folder over to the 3200's default Music share and enabled the server, the 3200 and content popped right up in iTunes and I was able to start playing music.

Figure 4: iTunes server

I didn't fare so well with the Web Camera feature. It is supposed to capture images from an attached USB webcam at intervals from 1 to 60 seconds at image sizes of 160x120, 320x240 (default) and 640x480 (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Web Camera capture

You can also enable a single schedule (Figure 6). There is no motion sensing, you can't automatically email or FTP images and the interval range is pretty short. So I'm not sure how much of a workout this feature will get.

Figure 6: Web Camera schedule

Updated 7/30/2008: Corrected Web Camera information

I couldn't confirm any of the features because the 3200 didn't even recognize the Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000 that I tried on both the front and rear ports. So I asked Thecus for a list of supported cameras and they pointed me to this page on their support site, which lists three Logitech (not including mine) and one Microsoft USB camera.

Integrated download managers are getting to be more common in NASes and the 3200's handles FTP, HTTP and BitTorrent downloads. Figure 7 shows one of each scheduled. If you want to see the controls for the BitTorrent downloads, there's a shot here in the slideshow.

Figure 7: Download Manager

Tags: BYOD, NAS, RAID, Thecus,

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