Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
For further benchmarking, we test each NAS using Intel’s NAS Performance Toolkit to rate 2 key areas of NAS performance. We measured File Copy speeds to and from the NAS and the Directory Copy speeds to and from the NAS. Thecus made a strong showing here by performing well in both areas and even outperformed our in house server by a good margin in file copy tests.
With “on demand” data needs in organizations or homes, it is not uncommon for devices like this to be running 24/7. With energy on our minds, most of us will not want a power hungry electric consumption monster on our network for streaming music, videos, or storing documents. Today’s NAS will usually consume less energy than a PC or a home built server by a good amount. In testing, we were able to determine that the n4200PRO used 29.38 W in HDD standby mode, 54.7 W during normal usage, and 55.68 W during heavy transfers. This bests our in house server which averages 87.08 W in HDD standby mode, 122.4 W in normal usage, and 136 W during heavy file transfers.
Testing was conducted using a Kill A Watt EZ P4460 Power Meter and measurements were taken every minute for 10 minutes then averaged for the results.
So what do we end up with here? The N4200PRO is a speed demon. The faster processor and larger amount of RAM definitely help the NAS perform well in our tests. The feature rich firmware allows you to effortlessly stream music to your PC’s or gaming systems, setup shares and users quickly, have an FTP server, mail server, and much more. Team that up with the online RAID expansion and you have a device that can be expanded as your collection of data, music, or videos grows. Having a built in Mini-UPS doesn’t hurt either. When you bundle it all together, you get what we at C.O.D. would consider a winner.
