Thecus N5200PRO NAS

Installation

Up to five harddrives can be inserted using brackets. The brackets are locked into place using simple keys. Considering the RAID levels supported, the support for hotswapping is very welcome.


To set the unit up for the first time a simple program is included. This program should auto-detect the device and allow for configuration. For an unknown reason this tool did not detect the device. I've tried on three computers to no avail.


Luckily the front display can be used to check and change the IP address. After a while the buttons hurt my fingers but I managed to change the IP to something useful. Once the IP is changed you can simply use the web interface to configure everything, like it should.




The default logon credentials are "admin/admin". I actually guessed this right the first time, no manual needed. On top is a bar with several menus that mostly point out themselves. Some show some information, others allow you to enable/disable/configure various services. The names pretty much describe what they do.


Once logged on, the main configuration consists of creating a RAID array. I got the unit with four 320 GB drives and a 500 GB drive. Obviously this is a mistake, however it doesn't interfere with the review. The 500 GB disk is simply handled as 320 GB disk, the remaining space is wasted.


For this review I configured a five drive RAID5 array. Performance isn't much different per RAID level, so this should give a fair idea of performance.
Actually creating the array took around five (!!!) hours. I'm not sure why it took so long to create an empty array. This process only has to be done once though, so it's no biggie.