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Thecus N5200 RouStor
The N5200 has the best RAID options, support
for five hard disks and plenty of Gigabit ports
Thecus has delivered some unusual
NAS appliances of late. Its new
N5200 RouStor takes the honours NAS ROUTER
as the first desktop unit with room
for five SATA hard disks and PRICE
support for RAID6. The new features £599 exc VAT
don’t end there either, as it employs SUPPLIER
a low-voltage Intel Celeron M and Boston Limited
offers three USB, an eSATA and five 08707 515950
Gigabit Ethernet ports.
The network ports have been split
INTERNET
up, with one providing WAN duties
www.boston.co.uk
and the other four grouped into a WARRANTY
separate switch where the 1yr RTB
appliance performs routing between
them – hence the model name. If
you want, you can also stop
systems on the LAN ports from
The RouStor has a built-in WAN
accessing the WAN port. connection and four-port Ethernet switch.
The N5200 is well built and looks
good with its smart black chassis Thecus bundles its own client and during this phase the shared
and blue backlit LCD and operator backup software. The latter is folders were offline.
panel. As the Linux-based OS is extremely basic, although it does Add a USB storage device and it’s
implemented on a separate IDE allow you to secure selected folders automatically presented as shared
CompactFlash card, you can to a destination of your choice, and storage. If you press and hold the
purchase the N5200 unpopulated schedule full and incremental down arrow button, the appliance
and add your own hard disks. The backups. will copy its contents to a local
drives are mounted in solid hot- We’re not convinced that many folder that’s also shared ready
swap carriers, which can all be will want to use RAID6. It’s costly in for use. SPECIFICATIONS
Desktop chassis •
individually locked. terms of lost storage, as it uses dual Performance over Gigabit Ethernet
600MHz Intel Celeron M
The web management interface is independent parity and needs at is good, with the Iometer utility • 256MB DDR SDRAM
the same as that presented by least four drives to function. It reporting 53MB/sec raw read • five hot-swap drive
Thecus’ N4100, which we reviewed requires the capacity of two for throughput with a share mapped to bays • supports RAID0, 1,
as Evesham’s SilverSTOR XS (see redundancy and can survive the a Supermicro 3.2GHz Pentium D 10, 5, 6 and JBODs
•3 x USB 2 • eSATA •
issue 134, p166). loss of two drives. For testing, we workstation. Copying a 691MB 64MB IDE CompactFlash
It’s rather basic, but does provide configured four 250GB Western video file to the appliance delivered • 5 x Gigabit Ethernet
easy access to all the functions. And Digital SATA/300 drives as a RAID6 good real-world write speeds of • internal power supply
functions there are aplenty, as it array and were left with less than 25MB/sec, while reading it from the • web browser
supports Windows, Linux, Unix and 0.5TB of available space. array returned 26MB/sec. management
Mac clients, runs an FTP server, and Furthermore, the array took nearly The web interface could benefit PERFORMANCE
can use NT domain and AD five hours to build and the volume from a smarter design, but
authentication along with its local won’t be made available until it’s otherwise there’s little to fault the FEATURES & DESIGN
user database. The Nsync option finished. RAID0 and 1 arrays can Thecus N5200 RouStor. It’s
also allows selected folders to be also be migrated to RAID5. Again, competitively priced and offers VALUE FOR MONEY
backed up regularly to another patience is required, as it took over some of the best features we’ve yet
N5200 appliance. Snapshots can three hours to migrate a two-disk seen from a desktop NAS appliance. VER
O VE R ALL
be run manually or scheduled, and mirror to a four-disk RAID5 array, Dave Mitchell
www.pcpro.co.uk REPRINTED FROM PC PRO JANUARY 2007
www.pcpro.co.uk JANUARY 2007 PC PRO
05-11677 PRO Thecus Reprint 160 29/11/06 09:51:45
