This edition of our newsletter features information on the new V5 firmware released by Thecus and also a video we produced which walks you through the management panel.
 The recent firmware release from Thecus is probably the most significant to date from both a UI (user interface) and the new features incorporated perspective. Thecus references the release as Version 5. Officially announced in on Thursday 3, 2011, it’s is touted to impact most of their products.
Major Changes
Performance – Thecus are claiming an increase of up to 50% when using industry leading testing and performance benchmarks, this is achieved by the consolidation of features and improvements in the coding based on a differing platform that Thecus has selected to adopt.
Photo Server – Thecus has introduced its Photo server aptly named Piczza! Sharing photos will never be an issue again; both personal and professional photos can get a makeover by designing a template and creating a gallery, or just upload and share with whoever you wish!
Thecus Share – Accessing content on your NAS using your iPhone or iPad is now totally possible. Stream media files via an internet connection, and enjoy these on your iPads and iPhones at your leisure. Pushing back ups from you iPads and iPhones to the Thecus NAS is as easy too, no need to worry about losing iPhone and iPad data any longer; your NAS can now store and restore your iPhone and iPad data with just a broadband connection.
FILESYSTEM – Enter EXT4. Finally Thecus has adopted EXT4 as the preferred file system; now matured, EXT4 offers the necessary capacity expansion that is now demanded, as well as the stability of EXT3. EXT4 has embraced all the fine features of its predecessor and expanded on the shortcomings, such as now being able to support a Volume size that is up to 1 Exabyte, with 4K block support each file is broken down to fewer pieces, providing better performance and much less space-wasting fragmentation. In EXT3 the number of subdirectories that a directory can contain is limited to 32,000. This limit has been raised to 64,000 in EXT4; these are just a few advantages of EXT4.
Support Larger Capacity Hard Disk Drives – The V5 now supports 3TB Drives allowing its flagship rack mount model the Thecus N8800PRO to now support 24TB capacity, indeed a humongous capacity at a price that will make any IT manager brim with happiness.
Updated V5 UI with a universal help menu – Finally a compact and clarity based menu driven storage management software that has incorporated a universal help functionality that will assist in completing tasks easily and with ease of use. Adding third party modules has become easy, and indeed Thecus now encourages third party developers to engage and add more features to its range of NAS devices.
Clearly Thecus has amalgamated all user and media suggestions for various improvements and rolled out a major upgrade in all senses of the word. This is always an encouraging sign in the current business platform when manufacturers don’t adopt change gracefully. |