Anyone hoping that as hard drives raced to the terabyte and beyond storage level that you'd be fine with just one hard drive is very wrong if you deal with a DVR or HD video or simply refuse to use the delete button with your libraries. Not to mention RAID which can take physical space in your computer and in regards to your storage capacity. A good solution for this is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) and we've looked at a number of these from Thecus. These units are small, cut down on power significantly, and are usually always on for anyone to access in addition to holding vast amounts of storage and allowing for easy RAID backups. Today we'll be looking at one which focuses on multimedia functionality: the M3800

The M3800 is based off a familiar brand to our readers: AMD. More specifically the AMD Geode line of ultra-low power processors and in this case the LX800. This is rated at, get this, .9W and runs at 500MHz and a max TDP of 3.8W but typically 1.8W according to AMD. This should save from the cost of power bills significantly from even a 780G based HTPC. That said obviously this can't run any recent versions of Windows so Thecus has used a proprietary Linux build which covers almost everything storage specific possible. We'll get to that later on though.

The Thecus M3800 is cubed shaped with dimensions of 158mm x 173mm x 128mm. Physically it's not too far off from a Shuttle PC. It comes in a sleek black which should go well with any other electronics and would not be out of shelf next to a receiver or TV in an entertainment setup.