Reviews - Thecus N5500 five-bay enterprise NAS and DAS. Worth £575?

[HEXUS]

We investigate the credentials of a business NAS that purports to do it all.

Read more.

[Gordy]

Url not working on this one.

[Funkstar]

Not exactly a glowing review there.

new interface that, whilst better than what Thecus has provided before, serves to keep it up-to-date with the competition

Either that is just badly worded, or you mean that yes it's better than it was before, but it is still lacking when you look at the competition.

performance ranges from sub-par to good.

Now thats an achievement!

I could go on, there are a couple of other parts of the conclusion that don't exactly fill you with confidence.

[0iD]

Well no-one could accuse Hexus of favoritism

The review isn't exactly what I expected, very surprised by the mediocre performance.

[aidanjt]

£500 is a rip off anyway. NAS manufacturers need to wise up with the prices they charge.

[MadduckUK]

£500 is a rip off anyway. NAS manufacturers need to wise up with the prices they charge.

my money would go here, still comically expensive though. but so so sexy

edit: and also WHS-able

[aidanjt]

my money would go here, still comically expensive though. but so so sexy

edit: and also WHS-able

At least you're getting 8 bays, and a hardware crypto engine for less than the Thecus. Pure, awesome. Nice catch, now if only I can find the two ethernet port variant, then it would be perfect.

[neonplanet40]

For that price you could build your own with a copy of WHS. I get upload speeds of 50-60MB per sec.

But yea definitely not a glowing review.

[D318]

Thecus almost reaches the limit of gigabit speed with one LAN only but QNAP needs two LANs. I wonder if QNAP’s performance is only half with one LAN.
Both Thecus and QNAP have at least 1GB of RAM. When testing with 1GB file with sequential read and write, I am pretty sure it is only accessing from RAM, not the hard disks themselves. So it doesn’t show the real performance. I suggest to test with at least 2GB file. The random read and write is reflecting the real performance because it is accessing the hard disks.

[Funkstar]

A NAS isn't going to cache a 1GB file, there is a hell of a lot less than 1GB in there available for caching anyway. Where do you think the OS and services are running from?

All these NAS boxes allow you to install extra software, all that has to go somewhere as well. Remember, these are just little PCs running linux so they have a regular, all be it stripped down OS. If you have 4GB in your Windows PC, can you cache a 4GB file? no. These NAS boxes work the same way.