A look inside, and a new interface
Open it up and it's fairly routine to add new drives or remove them, on-the-fly.
We tested with five Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB drives in RAID5 and via the EXT3 format without issue. Depending upon which file system is used - EXT3, XFS, ZFS - 16TB is supported, and a different file system can be used, concurrently, for various RAID setups.
Trying to be as all-inclusive as possible, Thecus offers multimedia support by way of iTunes server, photo web server, and a download manager. We had no problems with any of the features other than video-transfer functionality that was patchy at best.
Stripping out the motherboard, you can see the two DOMs at the bottom of the picture. Provided by Afaya and 128MB in size, they connect to the motherboard via an IDE port.
The brains of the outfit reside with an Intel Celeron M processor running at 1.86GHz, backed up by 1GB of DDR2 memory. A single fan, on top of the processor, is loud enough that it can be clearly heard from a few feet away.
The basics are covered with the extras. Thinking of new features, the N5500 brings the long-awaited AJAX-powered interface.
An improvement over previous clunky Thecus GUIs, the new AJAX interface is simple enough to use. The left-hand menus dictate what you see on the right. It's a simple matter of choosing the type of array you want - you can have more than one to run concurrently, as well as a different file format, remember - and building our RAID5 array took around six hours. Rebuilding the array was barely any quicker, though.
Thecus bundles in FarStone's DriveClone5 Pro software, which is handy as it enables, as the name suggests, drive cloning and backup through the Snapshot software.
However, we'd like to see a greater array of backup tools for the business user, as that's the environment that it will be likely used in.
