New To The Charts: Thecus N3200 Pro

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Tim Higgins

The N3200 Pro replaces Thecus’ original N3200 three-bay BYOD NAS. It is essentially an M3800 Stream Box, minus the HD AV output card. It uses a more powerful AMD LX800 CPU instead of the Freescale 8347 used in the N3200 and has 256 MB of DDR RAM, dual 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports supporting 4000, 8000, 12000, 16000 Byte jumbo frames, two USB 2.0 ports and one eSATA port. Three 3.5" SATA drives are hot-swappable, with drives up to 1 TB supported.

Power consumption is 27 W with the three drives active and 18 W when idle drive spindown kicks in. Scheduled shutdown and startup are supported as well as idle drive spindown after 30, 60, 90 or 120 minutes. Fan and drive noise are low, meaning the NAS is barely audible in a quiet room.

CIFS/SMB, AFP and NFS network file systems are supported, and files can also be accessed via FTP. HTTPS is supported both for admin access and web file browsing.

Media features include a Mediabolic UPnP AV / DLNA media server that also supports iTunes. There is also a web photo viewing service and download manager for HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent files. Other features include a USB print server and ability to do scheduled captures from selected USB web cameras.

There is no ability to back up internal volumes to external USB or eSATA drives. You can, however, use Thecus’ proprietary nsync to perform scheduled backups to other Thecus NASes. Client backup is supported via a bundled Windows backup program.

RAID 5 write performance using our new benchmark system with a Gigabit LAN connection averaged 42.9 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 4 GB. Read performance was even higher coming in at 52.4 MB/s with the same conditions. File copy performance using a Vista SP1 client under the same conditions (RAID 5, Gigabit LAN) measured 23.1 MB/s for write and 57.7 MB/s for read.

See the M3800 review for further information and use the NAS Charts to compare the N3200 Pro to other NASes.

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