With the big push for everything in the cloud we have been focusing on ways to consumers and businesses to bring their data back into their own control. One of the least expensive methods for this is through the use of a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. These are devices that have a minimum of two drive bays and allow for you to set up RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) Volume for performance and/or redundancy. Today in the Lab we have a five-bay NAS device from Thecus. This is an Atom based system with support for up to 15TB of RAW space and 3GB of memory. So let’s take a look at the Thecus N5550 and see what this $600 (empty) NAS has to offer as we dig deep into its design, build and features.
The Box and Goodies -The box that the N5550 shipped in is fairly plain, but this is a common trend in products that are meant for medium sized businesses and larger. In most cases the people buying this will not hold onto the box for long and if they do it is only in case the product needs to be sent back for repair.
Inside the box you have the N5550 safe inside a plastic bag and two Styrofoam end pieces along with a few accessories. Thecus has chosen to drop in the power cable, manuals, utilities DVDs, mounting screws, two sets of tray keys and a single network cable. We do wish that manufacturers that make NAS devices with two LAN Ports would include two network cables. It is a small detail, but one that can be important to the end user.
