This month at Computex, Thecus announced two new entry level-level NASes for consumers. The new N2350 and N4350 are budget-priced NAS products designed for the basic storage tasks. The systems feature a low-power Marvell Armada dual-core CPU and 1GB of DDR4 system memory. The N2350 features two drive bays with support for RAID 0, 1, and JBOD. The larger N4350 increases the capacity to four drive bays and adds support for RAID 5, 6, 10.

Slinging NAS appliances to home users is a difficult challenge. More than half of potential customers don't know the category exists, and most of the others think the systems are small form-factor PCs with a few extra drive bays. So offering basic boxes at low prices is an important aspect to expanding the bottom of the market, where consumers may not be interested in paying a high price tag for a storage appliance.

Both NASes ship with the company’s latest ThecusOS 7.0 graphical operating system. And while the underlying CPU isn’t going to be especially powerful, it’s enough to offer additional functionality such as external (Internet) file access. Not to mention additional applications/functions that can be installed through the OS itself.

The Thecus N2350 ($130) and N4350 ($200) have already started to ship to distributors. Both provide a low-cost entry point for users to experience NAS without spending a lot of money, and both carry a 2-year warranty.

Chris Ramseyer contributed to this report

Source: Thecus

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  • damianrobertjones - Sunday, June 4, 2017 - link

    Clever. Release a cheap version, which is just as over priced as the others, for less which will later enable them to increase the price of better units. $$$$$
  • TechDoug - Monday, June 5, 2017 - link

    A $130 price point is rather impressive. I expect Thecus will have a top seller with this.
  • Samus - Monday, June 5, 2017 - link

    If you have any experience with Thecus' crap, you'd know if they do have a top seller, it'll be the most negatively reviewed NAS in the channel.

    They have had some epic duds. It's hard to ignore Synology, yes they are more expensive, but not much more, and if you really need a cheap NAS, QNAP (or even Buffalo) is substantially better than Thecus.

    It's worth pointing out Thecus is actually a subsidiary of sorts of Orico. Orico is probably the crappiest accessory company in the history of computer accessories. Forget Packard Bell, forget Tandy, and forget Compudyne, Orico is pennies on the dollar crap.
  • Reflex - Monday, June 5, 2017 - link

    QNAP and Synology are peers in the industry. Not sure why you group QNAP with the 'cheap' options. They have a pretty complete range top to bottom.
  • wumpus - Thursday, June 8, 2017 - link

    I'd like to assume that anandtech readers are perfectly capable of sticking FreeNAS and ZFS on an old computer (almost always a better solution, might not be cheaper after factoring in time and it will eat more electricity). I will admit that being strapped for time + Wife Acceptance Factor could cause a few sales among readers.
  • shorty lickens - Thursday, June 8, 2017 - link

    Does ATech ever do benchmarks on NAS's? The consumer model I bought last year is extremely slow. If I ever upgrade I'll wanna know it advance how well it performs. And not from the manufacturer, but from independent sites.

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