Thecus N3200

[ Music ] ^M00:00:02 >> Hi, everyone, this is Dong Ngo for CNET.com and this is the N3200 NAS Drive from Thecus. I was actually very excited the first time I got this idiot out of the box as on the back, there's a PCI expansion slot. So it was looking like it's the first NAS device I've ever seen that got this slot. However, unfortunately, this is just a placeholder. As it turns out the chassis was designed to house more features than the internal circuit board has to offer. With that added design for aside, this is still an interesting NAS device. It has three hard drive bays. Each can house an SATA hard drive of up to 1TB making the maximum possible storage space of 3TB. The hard drives can be set up in one or three RAID configuration: 0, 1 or 5. They can also be set up in JBOB configuration. The device also features 1 eSATA port and two USB ports to host additional external storage. Other than the regular NAS features including dynamic DNS, FTP server, iTunes server, and so on, the N3200 has a few rather unusual features such as ISO Mount, where you can mount up to 200 ISO files and make the contents available to network users. This is a nice way to compress and organize storage space. In addition, the USB ports of the device can also be used to host printers and USB Webcams for surveillance. This is actually the first NAS device I ever run into that supports USB Webcams. And that's not all, you can also use a Wireless adapter with one of these USB ports in case you want to put the device at a place where you can't run the Ethernet cable to. The N3200 has two network ports, one WAN and one LAN. It's rather confusing, but the LAN port is only used to connect to your computer when the NAS is connected to a DSL or cable modem via its one port. This is for a situation where you have only one computer connecting to the Internet directly via the modem. If you have a router however, just connect the N3200 to the router with its one port and ignore the LAN port completely. The N3200 is available for about $320 without hard drives. That's a good price for a product that offers RAID 5. For more information on the device, please check at CNET.com for our in-depth review. My name is Dong Ngo and this has been the First Look at the N3200 NAS device from Thecus. ^M00:02:21 [ Music ]