Thecus N4200 Zero Crash review

Thecus’ new N4200 Zero Crash aims to be the most reliable small and medium-sized business (SMB) NAS appliance on the market. In this review we see whether it lives up to its claims.

IT Pro Verdict

The N4200 Zero Crash certainly lives up to its name. Alongside a whole heap of useful business-related storage features, it offers excellent fault tolerance as standard making it a good choice for small businesses that want the best protection for their shared data.

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The N4200 also supports iSCSI targets and you must decide during volume creation how much space you want kept aside for these. Targets are simple enough to create as you decide on the amount of space, provide a name which is to be appended to the IQN and enable it.

Backup features are reasonable as although Thecus still includes the hopelessly inadequate Backup Utility you now get the far superior FarStone DriveClone Pro included. This secures selected files and folders on workstations at scheduled intervals, has a snapshot service for disaster recovery and offers drive and partition cloning as well.

The DOMs have their own backup facilities and the appliance defaults to automatically copying the contents of the primary module to the secondary one once a day and will keep up to five versions. If the primary DOM fails, the secondary will be used to boot the appliance and it will also attempt to copy its contents across to restore the primary module.

The Li-ion BBM comes as standard and slips into a slot at the rear of the appliance. You can ignore the slot above this bay as although the motherboard has a PCI-Express slot available no expansion cards are currently supported by the N4200.

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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