The 3200 comes in a black aluminum case with plastic front and rear panels. Front panel lights and an LCD display are behind mirrored panels and the power supply is a large external "brick".
The BYOD NAS is powered by a Freescale 8347 @ 400Mhz CPU and has 256 MB of soldered-in RAM and 16 MB of flash. The SATA controller is a Silicon Image SiI3114 – PCI to 4 Port SATA150 and the two gigabit Ethernet ports (supporting 4 and 8K jumbo frames) are via Realtek RTL8211’s. There is also a Microchip PIC16F877 8 bit microcontroller. There are two USB 2.0 ports (one front, one rear) and an eSATA port for storage expansion.
The N3200 is somewhat unique in that it is a three-drive RAID 5 NAS (3.5" SATA drives). JBOD, RAID 0 and 1 are also supported, with hot-swap capability.
The feature set is similar to Thecus’ high-end N5200 and N5200 Pro, but with a bit more focus on home users with built-in download client, iTunes server, USB camera capture and photo sharing application.
Supported protocols include CIFS/SMB, NFS and AFP network file systems and user authentication via Microsoft NT domains and Active Directory. Other features include secure HTTPs access for administration and file access, FTP and print servers.
Write performance with a gigabit LAN connection with 4K jumbo frames averaged 22.2 MB/s for RAID 1 and 18.7 MB/s for RAID 5 for file sizes between 32 MB and 1 GB. Read performance for the same conditions averaged 27.4 MB/s for RAID 1 and 26.3 MB/s for RAID 5.
Use the NAS Charts to run your own comparisons and check out the slideshow for internal details and a user interface tour. Or read the full review.