Specifications

Thecus utilizes a SoC (System on Chip) made by the Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC). This SoC belongs to the Catalina series and has a single-core PowerPC CPU that has been clocked to run at 1 GHz. It includes two PCIe (Gen 2) interfaces and supports SATA II, USB, and Gigabit Ethernet ports. Its maker says its performance to reach upward of 2.1 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second), and it features a dedicated Ethernet offload engine that can also accelerate VPN applications. According to AMCC, the APM86491 can stream high definition videos (1080i/1080p) easily. The N2310 we reviewed a while ago uses a lower-clocked version of the same SoC.

The unit's RAM total of 1 GB can't be increased. It'll suffice for home use and will also easily handle the needs of a small office where the workload will probably be a bit higher as compared to a home-usage scenarios. The NAS can take up to four HDDs and supports all popular RAID levels, including RAID 10. We strongly advise you to take a look at Thecus's HDD/SSD compatibility list before you purchase any drives for the NAS.

iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) protocol support is present, which adds to the unit's feature set nicely as several NAS servers have no such support. Networking is taken care of by only one Ethernet port, though the SoC can support up to two. There apparently wasn't enough space on the mainboard for an additional connector. The other I/O connectors are a pair of USB 3.0 ports in the rear. We would like to see one of these at the front, where it would be more readily accessible. The N4310 also doesn't feature an HDMI port since its role is more network-centric as opposed to other, more expensive NAS servers that also feature a strong multimedia-centric role. However, the built-in Plex server will easily allow the N4310 to stream media content, although the lack of an HDMI port is a big disadvantage for a NAS server meant for use at home (and not only since an HDMI port can also help administrators with a NAS' set-up procedure or its configuration).

The N4310 is compact, which is in no small part due to its external power brick, since an internal PSU would require a larger chassis. Speaking of the external PSU, Thecus's power specification show it to be pretty strong; however, we will make a point of checking on those specifications with our high-end equipment.

This product's strongest advantage is probably its affordable price for a four-bay NAS. Thecus proved in the past that they can deliver products with a high performance per buck ratio, and we are very curious to see how the N4310 will score in terms of its ratio considering it is quite affordable. Taking into account the fact that the N4310 and N2310 units exploit almost the same SoC, someone would expect them to be priced similarly, but the price gap is actually pretty big.