Thecus N5550 5-Bay NAS Review

When I got the N5550 in and got it out of its shipping box, to see a brown box with a sticker on it did surprise me a little bit, especially going by the colourful and info packed exterior to the N4200 Pro that was looked at earlier in the year. At this point you can sometimes get a psychological feel that this is not as good as other products purely because typically brown boxes are not as interesting as coloured ones. Keeping an open mind though and thinking that this cannot be the case I put it aside.

Going onto the unit itself, I like the styling on the front to keep its presence in the home or work environment a bit more conservative than some others that look to ‘industrial’, with the glossy front door and matt side panels.

The main part I will have to mention about this NAS is with out a doubt the performance. I know some of you will be either wondering how on earth those speeds were achieved and or shouting at the screen saying its all wrong, but even I thought this to being with, how can thing NAS put though data faster than the theoretical max bandwidth? Surely something somewhere must be caching the data? I did think this to start and after contacting Thecus themselves and just running my figures, by them, I found out that yet again, we were very close to matching their own test lab results.

So why is this? we what you have to take into consideration is that on comparison to the other NAS’ that we have already looked at, this has five drives and not four, so naturally there is more scope for better results. Naturally this is not everything and a large matter of this speed capability is down to the N5550’s SATA and LAN controllers working in harmony to give the best performance possible.

Another feature of the N5550 that I would like to touch on is the video playback via HDMI and VGA. Its not a real intention to not look at this aspect as it is a feature of the NAS but allows for you to use it in conjunction with the likes of XBMC if you wish. Sadly this feature is redundant at the moment, until the new ThecusOS 5.0 software is released in July. Thecus were showing off the new features with a bit of a teaser at Computex, and we were lucky enough to get a first glimpse at it here. All we can say for now, is that we know July is the release date, and it should put Thecus in an even more dominating position within the NAS market.

Kitting out a larger NAS with drives is not always going to be cheap, but there is the scope for buying three or four drives (depending on the RAID config that is chosen) and then adding in extra drives at a later date to spread the overall cost out. The system itself though is set to retail at around the £480 mark, which in relation to the N4200 Pro is a little bit more expensive, depending on the retail outlet but a lot more is on offer. As we’ve mentioned before, these devices can and do seem like a lot of money to be shelling out, but for the money and what is on offer, there really is not need to justify the cost or look at other options.

Yet again I have been wowed by a NAS box from Thecus, and without thinking about it I would happily recommend any of their products to anyone that is in the market for network storage. Watch this space as well, as things are soon set to get a lot better with their new OS for NAS.