Thoughts, HEXUS.awards and HEXUS.right2reply
It wasn't until writing the conclusion to this review that something really hit home. This little box can currently hold 3.5TB worth of hard drives. That's around 700,000 mp3s, maybe more. It's around 380 DVD videos before transcoding to DivX/XviD/etc, presuming they take up two whole layers, and that's a conservative number. The point here, is that's a hell of a lot of storage. Too much? It pains us to say it, but for some, yes. It's lucky, then, that the N5200 will allow you to put a number of smaller drives in, say three 250GB models to start with, and if you fill those, you can always expand the array onto a couple more. Happier now? So are we.
£600. That's roughly what this will set you back, minus hard drives. Add in five 750GB drives and you'll be forking out a number closer to two thousand. However, act a bit more modestly and you can still have a terabyte (even in RAID-5) for under a grand. We quite like the sound of that.
At the end of the day, this is most definitely a product for small to medium enterprises. Its feature set, its potential disk space and now its performance demonstrate that. However, trying to put an enthusiast spin on things, if your home really needs this much storage, network-accessible, to share (and we know some of you reading this will) then it's got enough grunt to serve media to multiple clients, no trouble. It's not something of a requirement for this particular reviewer, who'd go for something a little more budget (and probably suffer a performance hit as a result,) but the Thecus N5200 is clear in its appeal.
Thecus seems to have a lust for trying out new things like the Snapshot feature, and we recommend that, just as long as it doesn't compromise the quality of its products. We don't think it has, but we'll be happy to see an update to the N5200's firmware that brings us even more bells and whistles that might just give someone the final nudge towards making a purchase. That said, if all you want is a NAS product, and don't care about anything else, the N5200 will still deliver.
Thecus has always had well-built NAS boxes. Now it has a great-performing one too. In light of this, we're adamant that the Thecus N5200 deservers the speed award in our Executive category. We toyed with a 'Media - Recommended' award, but ultimately, we felt that it's not suited to quite enough people in that bracket for us to hand it one. Still, hats off to Thecus for its new, fast NAS.
