The M3800 is a three-bay BYOD NAS designed for media storage and serving. It also can play up to 1080p HD video when connected via its HDMI or component video outputs.
The packaging is essentially the same as the Thecus N3200 and N3200Pro. It (and the N3200Pro) use an AMD LX800 CPU instead of the Freescale 8347 used in the N3200. It also has 256 MB of DDR RAM, dual 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports supporting 4000, 8000, 12000, 16000 Byte jumbo frames, two USB 2.0 ports and one eSATA port. Three 3.5" SATA drives are hot-swappable, with drives up to 1 TB supported.
Power consumption is 32 W with the three drives active. Scheduled shutdown and startup are supported as well as idle drive spindown after 30, 60, 90 or 120 minutes. Fan and drive noise are low, meaning the NAS is barely audible in a quiet room.
CIFS/SMB, AFP and NFS network file systems are supported, and files can also be accessed via FTP. HTTPS is supported both for admin access and web file browsing.
Media features include a Mediabolic UPnP AV / DLNA media server that also supports iTunes. There is also a web photo viewing service and download manager for HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent files. Other features include a USB print server and ability to do scheduled captures from selected USB web cameras.
There is no built-in backup for the internal or attached drives. But there is a bundled backup utility for Windows clients.
RAID 5 write performance using our new benchmark system with a Gigabit LAN connection averaged 38 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 4 GB. Read performance was even more impressive coming in at 56.9 MB/s with the same conditions. File copy performance using a Vista SP1 client under the same conditions (RAID 5, Gigabit LAN) measured 21.9 MB/s for write and 69.2 MB/s for read.