Thecus N5200BR NAS Server Review with 5 drives in RAID 6

Inside The Thecus N5200

The bundle included with the Thecus N5200 is fairly solid. It comes with a warranty card, driver and utility CD, network cable, eSATA cable, USB A-to-B cable, power cable (kettle lead), four drive cage keys and enough screws to install seven hard drives even though the N5200 only supports five hard drives.

The back of the Thecus N5200 has what you would expect: internet connections! The N5200 features a 4-port Gigabit switch, along with the individual Gigabit port. There’s also an RS232 interface, for terminal access, and a USB port above that. At the very top of the back panel are two USB ports for hooking up other drives or a WiFi card to give the box wireless capabilities. Next to the USB ports is a lone eSATA port if an external drive is ever needed. At the very bottom of the NAS server is a small power supply that does include a power switch. The 4-port Gigabit switch that is built-in the Thecus 5200 is often looked over, but it will save money down the road if you are installing it on a network with only four systems. A LINKSYS SD2005 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Switch will set you back roughly $60, so keep that in mind when shopping for a NAS server.

After removing the three thumb screws on the back pack panel, the covers on the Thecus N5200BR can be removed. Once the panels are removed you can see the motherboard inside and the front LCD panel. The Thecus N5200 is powered by a Celeron M-600 CPU that is passive cooled, along with the Intel north bridge chipset. The Thecus N5200 has a 128MB flash drive that keeps the firmware and software used to operate the box nice and safe. The red 256MB DDR2 400MHz memory module is from Kingmax. Since there really isn’t anything to adjust or overclock on the inside there is no need to go into much detail about the internals.