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Today we are checking out an affordable 5-bay NAS from Thecus that can handle up to 20TB’s of storage and is powered by an Intel Atom processor with a large 2GB memory capacity. Called the N5550 it is priced at a little over $500. At this price there are few 4-bay NAS products that can match the value and features of the N5550...
Late last year Thecus released the N5550 which is a 5-bay network attached storage server aimed at small to medium businesses. Like any of today’s NAS devices the N5550 was upgraded with an Intel Atom processor to provide more grunt when dealing with multiple clients.
A five bay NAS might seem like an unusual number of drive bays, but really it’s not as storage technologies such as Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent) Discs, often referred to simply as RAID can utilize RAID 5 parity handling when using three or more drives. This means that the N5550 not only supports RAID 5 but also RAID 0, 1, 6, 10, and JBOD as well as RAID migration. With hard drive technology now hitting a 4TB capacity on a single disk, this means the N5550 can potentially house 20TB of storage. With an asking price of just $510 the Thecus N5550 is one of the more affordable Atom powered NAS servers to feature four or more bays. In comparison the Drobo 5N costs $600, the QNAP TS-569L $750 and the Synology DS1512+ a whopping $840. So in terms of pricing Thecus looks to have the competition beat. Even when looking at 4-bay models users are still going to pay $650 for the 4-bay QNAP TS-469L or Synology DS412+, while the newer DS413 still costs $530. So with that in mind let’s move on to see what the N5550 has to offer... |
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John |
Posted on: 02/13/2013 08:05 PM
Certainly a nice price. Don't like the idea of having the door, especially when its needed to access the USB port. Still its very cheap. |
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Sym |
Posted on: 02/13/2013 08:34 PM
If you are after a cheap NAS then sure its okay but I would rather get a better quality 4 or even 2 bay NAS. Just my 2c worth. |