The biggest sales pitches speaking for the new Thecus N2310 NAS are its incredibly affordable price, ultra-low power consumption, and decent performance. However, Thecus had to sacrifice many features and capabilities to cut production cost by as much as possible, and a quick look at its casing will show that it doesn't have what we call a nice look. Thecus actually used the most affordable materials they could get - the plastic enclosure and its front bezel easily reveal its low price. The trays are also cheaply made, and I believe that they should provide a cover for them to make the face of the N2310 more appealing. Thecus uses a highly efficient but weak SoC, which might suffice for use at home, but it can't cope with more than three clients asking for a lot of data. Speaking of the GUI, I like the new windowed operating system, but Thecus programmers still have a lot of work ahead of them. Its usability and feature set can't be compared to that of the competition. Navigating to various options inside the OS isn't as easy and fast, for example, and you can't re-size any windows. There is also no support for widgets, and the general appearance of the firmware's landing page isn't nice, especially if you compare it to QNAP's or Synology's pages. Thecus's Help feature surely is an asset, but I noticed many grammatical errors and often had the impression that they simply used an automated translator for English texts. Continuing with its shortcomings, there is no iSCSI support, the system status page where you can check on CPU, RAM, and HDD utilization is missing, though it is in the ThecusOS walk-through manual, and there is no module for IP camera control. Thecus also didn't include any power management options for installed HDDs, which means that the disks can't enter sleep mode, and any networking change demands for a reboot, which I find silly.

I know I am being really tough with the N2310, an entry level model, but it is my job to highlight everything I find, whether good or bad. With that said, it is now time to mention its good attributes since I already covered its most crucial shortcomings in the paragraphs above. These start with its highly affordable price and very low energy demands. The NAS also achieved high overall network transfer speeds with up to three clients, which was a nice surprise since I didn't expect the N2310 with its low-clocked CPU to perform as well. This small NAS also features USB 3.0 support and comes with a Bittorrent client pre-installed, which turns it into an independent download station for your torrent files. Its dimensions are very small, which makes placing it anywhere in your home a breeze, and the new windowed interface, though it needs much work before it can meet the competition head-on, provides many features and is rather easy to use - even for novice users. And this unit's power brick will serve you reliably as time goes on because it is of high quality.

To conclude, the N2310 has many issues, but most of its shortcomings are due to the immaturity of its fresh Thecus OS6 operating system. Thecus will hopefully fix all or at least most of these issues in the near future. The N2310's CPU can cope with usage scenarios specific to a home environment, but the GUI will lag significantly under heavy data throughput, although speeds are fast enough. But with everything said and done, you can't be very picky since you basically get a fully featured NAS that will cover most of your needs for 160 bucks.