Thecus N4310 4-Bay NAS Review

Basic Installation and Setup

Initialise

Thecus has created a little piece of Windows software to get started really easy and really fast with your new NAS, the Thecus Intelligent NAS, and it can be downloaded from the official support site. Just launch it and it should find your new Thecus N4310 NAS in no time. Just select it from the list and press next to get started.

My drives are already set up now, but the tool will provide you with a couple easy steps to set them up. Please do select ‘quick RAID’ or you might end up waiting 3 days for the system to perform a sector by sector analysis of the drives to make sure they’re 100% working. That was a lot of sectors to check on my four 6TB drives.

The Thecus ID is optional and you can skip it even though it looks like a mandatory step. There is no harm in doing so and it does bring along some advantages like automatic DDNS function and hostname for your NAS. Now just click the Browser button and the administrator interface will open up.

Basic configuration

Once logged in, you’ll be presented with an Initialization Wizard to guide you through the basic settings. First you can supply your email information to get instant notifications if hardware should fail.

The next step will be to select what drives you’ll want to use. It will automatically determine the best setup depending on drives available.

A new user will also be created for you too, as the administrator user shouldn’t be used on a daily basis.

You get a last view at your setting to verify them before you submit it and the creation starts.

Returning to the dashboard, we should set up some shared folders next. There are some pre-determined folders used by the system, but you’ll most likely want to create your own. Just hit the Add button, enter a name, and hit Apply; couldn’t be simpler.

Right now no one has access to the folder, except the administrator. So we will have to set the ACL for the folder too. Just select it and hit the ACL button in the toolbar. Select your user and then click on the plus button on the rights column it should be added to; in most cases, it would be writeable.

Add Ons

The Thecus N4310 has all the basic features covered, but you might need to configure them to your needs. Download manager, Media stations and so forth.

Like with any NAS, Thecus has a good list of extra features that can be installed as well as support for third-party created plugins.

File system

If you aren’t satisfied with the initial choice of filesystem and RAID setup, it’s real easy to change and should be done as one of the first steps. The OS will guide you through the entire process and you don’t really have to do much besides selecting the drives you want to use and the drive mode.