Thecus N2100 Y.E.S Box (NAS)

Thecus N2100 Y.E.S box is a storage device suitable for SOHO environments and
has two 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet ports. You can connect a PC to one and the
office network to the other. Y.E.S. stands for your enterprise/entertainment
storage, because it has features for home as well as serious office use. It can
hold up to two SATA hard disks, which have to be purchased separately. The box
has three USB ports-two in the rear and one in the front -to connect external
hard drives in RAID 0/1 and JBOD configurations, which when connected to it also
get shared on the network.

Interestingly, the device is embedded with a variant of Windows NT OS. It
allows you to share photos and music among other things. Plus it has a button
that can be pressed to back up data directly from any USB drive. But you have to
ensure that the USB drive is of lower capacity than that of the YES box or you
better check it has sufficient free space. It has a web-based configuration tool
that lets you configure the user access of a share.

It took us about 3 min 40 secs to transfer 1GB of MP3 files from a PC to it
over a Gbps ntwork through its backup utility. It is very decently priced at Rs
25,000 as compared to the QNAP TS-101(reviewed in January 2007 issue), which is
also priced at Rs 25,000 but can mount only one SATA hard disk and 2 USB ports
as against two SATA hard disks and 3 USB ports of N2100.

Bottom Line: An interesting product that can be used for entertainment
and office use alike.