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To date, we have looked at two Thecus network attached storage products, the N5400 Pro, the N4100 Pro and today we are going to make that a third with Thecus' new N3200 Pro. We began with the N5400 Pro last summer and found it to be simply an amazing product. It had it all: features, ease of use and well, it was of course fast. Unfortunately it did also come with a hefty price tag, and was perhaps unnecessary for the average household. Early 2009 we looked at Thecus' N4100 Pro, the N5400 Pro's four bay counterpart; it could accommodate one less hard drive, packed less processing power, less memory, and was generally a scaled down version of the N5400 Pro, we found it to also be an excellent product, and by no means did performance disappoint. Its lower price point made it more attractive for mainstream users but still however it carried a $400 dollar price tag. As you can imagine, our review today is of the N3200 Pro which as Thecus' nomenclature suggests, houses three hard drives and accordingly, is scaled down from the N4100 Pro. Storage space can be described in many ways- we can rationalize the thousands upon thousands of bytes in more manageable and forms such as the number of songs, pictures, or videos a drive can contain, but no matter how we numerically struggle to fathom the sheer amount of digital content we can fit on various devices what we can logically stow away trumps sensibility, though we would not want it any other way. From megabytes, to gigabytes, and now, on the fringes of the terabytes, storage technology continually conquers new milestones with no end in sight.



Thecus, founded in 2004, aims to bridge the gap between the digital home and networking with high quality, high performance products and innovation. Focused on hardware and software integration, Thecus aims to provide easy to use media storage solutions to allow even greater network connectivity in the home and office environment.

Technological advancements and innovation has done wonders for the modern computer. I do not intend to merely state this in platitude or to assure readers of my grasp of the obvious, but instead shift our focus beyond raw numbers. More astonishing than computing power, storage space or the number of pixels that can fit on a screen is perhaps the application of such advancements. A few short years ago, network attached storage drives for the home would have been unheard of, the terabyte would have required a massive array of drives, portable mass storage would have still been in its infancy, and let's not forget the convenience of carrying one's entire music collection in ones pocket; not too long ago, this too would have been laughable. With so many so many options available to the average consumer, why network storage drives? The answer is simple: access and availability. Network attached storage units, or NAS units function as individual computer systems attached to a home network. They have their own processor, own memory, own operating system, they are designed for handling storage and storage oriented functions- nothing else. This not only cuts down on the amount of processing a system accessing the NAS would need to do, but also serve as a reliable center of a small network or cheap expansion to an existing network.