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3.5 Terabyte NAS Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the thats-a-whole-lotta-naked dept.

Steve Kerrison writes "Thecus' new N5200 NAS can hold five SATA drives, which with currently available drives means up to 3.5TB (or 2.75TB in RAID-5) of storage before formatting. From the review: '£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.'"

2 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. A custom built alternative by nxtw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (All prices approximate.)

    This will support 4 drives over SATA, or 7 if you use all of the IDE channels:
    $105 4U case and 400w power supply
    $165 915G Socket 479 Motherboard w/ 4 SATA, 2 IDE, and gigabit ethernet.
    $71 Celeron M 370 (Dothan) CPU
    $25 DDR2 memory (256MB)
    $25 CompactFlash OS drive (1GB)
    $15 IDE to Compact Flash adapter
    $0-25 Linux OS -- there are specialized NAS distributions available commercially for those that afraid of setting things up themselves
    = $406-$431

    Which beats this device's $670 lowest price found on Froogle.

    Additions:
    $20 4x SATA I
    $60 4x SATA II
    $50-100 Replacement power supply
    +$60 1GB DDR2
    +$150 Pentium M CPU

    Sure, the Celeron M will use more power than a Celeron M ULV, and the included power supply may be inadequate for configurations with large drives (but that's more drives than the article's product supports). And this device doesn't have the USB device capaibility, either. But you've got the freedom to do things how you like.

  2. NAS without RAID5? by poptones · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No way would I use a machine like that without a RAID5 setup. I've lost countless hours (and access to music I no longer have, since the CDs were lost in a move or just quit playing). Whatever you spend on discs, going from 4-5 only adds 20% in cost, which even at $400 is pretty damn cheap compared to the work a TB or two of storage represents.

    Old machines with ATX type motherboards and such are far too cheap to justify shelling out $700 or more for a "dedicated" type solution. Get an old machine with a P2B-F motherboard and a decent PII cpu, throw away the old power supply and put in a shinty new $70 or so power supply, plug in a controller card if you wanna use SATA drives, and off you go - essentially for the price of the drives you want to put in it.