X-bit labs

Thecus YES N2100 Box External Storage System Review (page 2)

Category: Storage

by Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 04/25/2006 | 05:38 PM ]

Closer Look

What did we find in this nice-looking box? Of course, the first thing we took out of the box was the device itself that looks like a gray enclosure for two 3.5-inch hard disk drives. It is equipped with three USB ports and two Ethernet ports.

Besides that we also received a ton of cables and smaller boxes that contained: a power supply unit with the power cable, two network cables, a set of fastening screws, a mouse pad and a user’s manual with a CD-disc.

Well, let’s take a closer look at the device itself.

There is a big Power On button on the front panel, a set of status LEDs and a USB port right next to the button.

The back panel features two RI-45 ports, another two USB ports and a fan.

Inside the N2100 Box there is an Intel 80219 processor (exactly like that one that is used in most pocket PCs), two Realtek 8110 chips responsible for the network support, a flash memory chip and a SATA controller from Silicon Image. Let’s see what all these great things will do for us in real life.

When I pushed the Power On button for the first time, it produced a slight clicking sound and fell into the box. It appeared that the glue that was used to hold the button top in place wasn’t of the best quality. However, a few drops of Super Glue solved the problem in no time once and for all. I have also used the same Super Glue to secure the fastening of the Quick Copy button responsible for starting the copy process from the USB device connected to the Box.

The next frustrating discovery was the location of the status LEDs: the light they emitted didn’t really go through the corresponding slots in the front panel of the device. As a result, we could only tell what was going on by the light reflection on the ventilation grid. These are the only drawbacks we revealed during our work with the device: other than that everything was just fine, so I assume that these drawbacks can be considered minor defects of this particular sample (serial number - 384).