Installation, Testing and Comparison:

For testing the N2200 I used two 3.5” Western Digital 750GB Caviar Black Hard Drives.

I wanted to use the same drives with the comparison NAS, but the Seagate BlackArmor NAS220 that I has already comes with the hard drives installed, two 1TB drives. Seagate brand of course.

To get them ready for use you just have to secure them in the drive trays with a few screws, then put them in the N2200.

When powered on the Thecus N2200 has a very bright blue LED in the front, below that is the status indicators as well, but they blink more than stay lit at all times.

I have another Thecus NAS box on my network, the N3200 Pro, so I already had some Thecus setup software installed, but for some reason I couldn't use that software to set up the N2200 and I had to install the software on the disc that came with it.

I setup the N2200 using the easy to use software, I configured it for Raid1 or Mirrored because that's the same way the BlackArmor is set up and I wanted the comparison to be as close as possible.

Once the setup is complete you'll then have access to several network drives and even shared printers:

There's quite a bit to cover in the administrator interface, so I'm not going to cover everything individually, most the stuff is self-explanatory anyway.

One thing odd was that when the setup said it was complete, it really wasn't, I logged into the N2200 to find that it was still building the Raid array. I should have know it wasn't that quick to create the array.

Once the Raid was finished then I could truly access everything and then start exploring the back end. It's set up with an expandable tree style menu on the left side, and a small quick menu at the very bottom of the interface.

It's broken down into sections of System Information, System Management, System Network, Storage, User and Group Authentication, Application Sever, Module management and Backup. Here's several screen shots of each open to show you the options:

Here's a few select choices, the hard drives, the raid level, users, FTP and media settings:

The User side interface is the Web Disk, and it's basic and simple to use so anyone with even the smallest amount of knowledge will be able to access it. There's also the Photo Gallery as well so you can share your photos with everyone.

So as you already know I am comparing the Thecus N2200 to my Seagate BlackArmor NAS220. The BA220 is set up in Raid 1 as well so they're essentially the same in that respect.

I have them connected to the same switch on my network, a 10/100/1000 Netgear brand switch.

For the testing part of this, there's really three parts to it.

I'm transferring via FTP on my network, from my PC to the boxes.

Three types of transfers, one single large file, a 3.02Gb ISO file, a single 900MB .TS Vido file and folder that is also 3.02 GB ins size, but it contains 874 files within 199 folders.

The first test is the Files and Folders test:

As you can see the Black Armor is a bit faster.

The next test is the single ISO file:

again the BlackArmor is a bit faster.

And finally the single small file test:

and yet again the BlackArmor is faster.

I have several NAS boxes floating around and I randomly picked the BlackAmor for testing, mainly because it was already sitting on my desk.... A little bit ago I reviewed the QNAP TS-419P (review here), and I found the BlackArmor beat that one as well. From my experience with the BlackArmor it's a fast little NAS box that's hard to beat really. I'm going to be publishing a NAS box roundup over at TestFreaks shortly with many compared, so we'll really see who the fastest is then. I'll link the article from here of course when it's live.

So it's not as fast as the BlackAmor, but it is fairly fast. To me the speed is fine really, I'm not in that much of a hurry really to have my files transferred instantaneously. I do my backups manually via FTP, and I set it to just exit when the transfer is complete, so it goes about it's business while I go about mine. There's no real rush to get the files over there for me.

As far as web transfers, well the speed there is all going to depend on the internet connection you've got. I run 20/30 FIOS, so my files transfers are nice and fast while I'm away.

USB transfers are as to be expected, you're limited to the speed of the USB port obviously, but one-touch copy is a nice feature to instantly backup your data.

On the back of the N2200 you'll find three more USB ports in addition to the one on the front, these can be used to expand the storage via a USB hard drive. This isn't a bad idea, but I'd much rather see an eSATA port or two back there.

I did run into one issue, and that is with the back end interface, it's incredibly slow to do much of anything. Anytime you enter a new section the 'Please Wait' window pops up for many seconds at a time before the interface is usable.

This is the new interface that Thecus is using, on my N3200 Pro I have the old interface and it's much faster, so I know it's not my network or the hard disks, it's the unit itself and how it interacts with the interface that is making everything slow. The good thing is though that once you set everything up the way you want it on the back end you won't have to spend much more time there, it's kind of set it and forget it really. So you'll only have to deal with the slow interface initially really.

The price of the Thecus N2200 is comparable to others coming in at around $200. $193.37 on Amazon actually. No disks are included of course though so it will cost more to actually get the unit up and running, but that's common with most NAS boxes today.

Overall the N2200 is not a bad little unit, it works well and it looks great.