Introduction
Network-attached storage (NAS) manufacturers find themselves in a bit of a quandary at the moment. The low-end of the market - the consumer side - has been greedily eaten up by some of the bigger names in the networking world, including Netgear, Buffalo, and Linksys. The other end of the market, designed for business users who want greater functionality, has now become a battlefield for a glut of small-scale Taiwanese vendors that attempt to outdo one another with new-and-improved features. Selling £500-plus NAS/DAS boxes is hard work.
Thecus, Synology and QNAP come to mind when thinking of multi-bay NAS appliances that purport to do it all. Thecus' five-bay N5500, an updated version of the N5200 and N5200 Pro models we took a look at some time ago, is armed with a couple of new, innovative features. We take a look and see if it's worth almost £600.
