8 Bay NAS?

I appreciate that the answer will probably be along the lines of "we do not comment on future hardware plans", is there any chance of an 8-bay NAS becoming available in the forseeable future?

I ask this because the controller in the N5200Pro is able to handle 8 SATA connections.

Having looked at how the N5200 is assembled (very cleverly i have to say) I can imagin it wouldn't be that dificult to expand it to have 8 bays. Certainally the back plane connecter would either need expanded, so some of the power pins converted into signal pins. And more traces are probably needed on the main board. But other than that i can't think why it couldn't be done :)

Any comment?

Personally i would quite like an 8 drive RAID-6 device :mrgreen:

Dear Sir,

Due to the CPU performance & mechanical design N5200, the 5 bays is most effective design for performacne.
Since V2.00.04 the N5200 PRO and 1U4500 new add the stackable function for iSCSI volume, we could stack 2 N5200 PRO iSCSI volume and the PC could using the iSCSI voume from 2 N5200 PRO.

Yvon.

thanks for the reply Yvon.

I'm sure if a 600MHz cpu can handle five drives (as in the 5200 non-pro) then a 1.5GHz cpu could handle eight

I didn't know iSCSI was able to do that, I would still prefer eight drives in one box though :)

My first test using the N5200 went well and I just ordered two N5200 Pro today and hope to take advantage of the iSCSI feature. But I agree with Funkstar that I would purchase the eight-bay design if there is any.