Installation:
The physical installation consists of adding up to four drives of your choice, and the process is rather simple. Typical 3.5 inch SATA drives fit snugly into the trays, and they can be secured with the screws provided. A completely tool-less installation would be nice, but this design works well and feels well built.
For this review, four 250GB Maxtor MaxLine III SATA 3Gbps (16MB cache) drives were installed. The images above show an example of one mounted to a drive tray, and the image below shows them being slid back into the N4100PRO for use. The whole process took less than five minutes, and once completed it was time to power it up and see what it could do!
In Use:
Once booted up the Thecus N4100PRO gives a quick beep to let you know it is ready, and otherwise the only noise is the dull sound of the cooling fan and the drives spinning. The unit itself is rather quiet, but with four drives inside you will probably be able to hear the hum from across the room when active. A variety of LEDs light up on the front panel, and the LCD itself casts a bit of light, so it won't go unnoticed.
The LCD panel walks you through each step the device is taking while booting up, and then once ready for action it scrolls through a variety of information. You can let it automatically switch between providing information on fan speed, temperature, drive status, and network status, or you can use the arrow keys to browse at your own speed.
