Thecus N5200B NAS

Thecus N5200B is a 5-bay SATA hot-swappable NAS device equipped with an

ultra-low voltage Intel Celeron M Processor, which results in energy savings.

With 5-bays you have a whopping 5 TB of storage area using five 3.5” 1 TB HDDs,

but sadly this NAS box doesn't ship with any pre-installed hard-drives. You have

to get your own. This NAS box provides you with multiple RAID configurations:

RAID 0, RAID 5, RAID 6, Raid 10 and JBOD. For connectivity it has two Gigabit

Ethernet ports and USB ports. One can connect the device to network or directly

to a PC to work as DAS.

The device has an intuitive Web-based console and two interesting features:

power management and wake-on-LAN. The power management feature allows the NAS

administrator to set power on/off times for the device to conserve energy and

with the wake-on-LAN feature the users can remotely turn on the systems.

It took us about 15 min 10 secs to transfer 10 GB of data over an isolated

Gbps LAN from PC to this device on which we attached a 7200 rpm, 120 GB HDD.

When compared with the price of Buffalo TerraStation Live NAS (reviewed November

'07) that had four 250 GB drives shipped included in its price of Rs 55,590,

this one is priced quite high at Rs 59,000.

Bottomline: Thecus might appear costly, but it

comes packed with features unique for small work group.