With broadband becoming more and more popular and at last slowly becoming slightly faster at least here in the United States, massive amounts of storage size are now being gobbled up in no time. Who thought that they'd ever need a terabyte hard drive let alone more than two but with HD video, uncompressed audio formats such as FLAC, this amount of space can be taken up in no time. Not to mention other uses such as web cameras for surveillance, DVRs which also pile up HD storage in television programs, and on and on. Running a full file server can also be inefficient at times without a need for that much processor power. This is where NAS servers come in or Network Attached Storage, they are more power efficient and can be used for a variety of storage needs or specific tasks. In the past they've been used by larger businesses but Thecus, a company you may have read reviews of their products from us and other websites, also offer more affordable and easier to use NAS solutions for the consumer and small business. Today we'll be looking at one of these, the N4100 Pro.

The N4100 Pro is a black, sleek, cubed shaped computer which doesn't look too far off from Shuttle PCs. There's a front panel door which opens easily which hides the four SATA drive bays. Installing hard drives in there is a snap, simply take out the drive bay, screw the hard drive into it, slide it back in and your hard drive is ready to go. There's no lock for the front panel but there's something better, locks for the hard drive bays. Nothing advanced here but similar locks that you might see on enthusiast cases. LEDs on the left also keep you up to date of the current status of the NAS.

Also on the front is an LCD panel which gives you status updates on all information it cycles through such as current status of the NAS, temperature, RAID configuration, IP address, and more. All easily readable and helpful if you don't have a computer up currently to read out information from.

On the back are two more USB ports in addition to the one up front, two fans which are visible, and the LAN and WAN ports.

Taking apart the N4100 Pro is a snap if one is so inclined. There are three thumb screws in the back which secure it in place but with those out it slides easily out and you can see the hardware it's running off on the inside. Hear you can make out the larger heatsink on the Geode processor, the onboard flash which runs the OS, and the RAM which is upgradeable.

One doesn't need much of a bundle with the N4100 Pro but it does come with a power cord, screws, Gigabit LAN cable, start up guide, warranty card, drive clone software, and CDs for setup and installation.