325xi Wrote: > So, what do you guys think about Thecus N5200? Review say it blows > everything around out of the water performance wise. > > Can it be made running SlimServer?
Seeing as no body here has posted anything useful in regards to the Thecus N5200 let me start by atleast giving you a review from a person who has 3 of these babies. First I'd like to just let people know that I picked these up at www.eaegis.com. At $669 its really a good price not to mention free shipping and excellent support. I'm by no means related to them and I bought from them by searching froogle.com but so far I'm impressed by the level of support I got from these guys. Now let me elaborate on why support is so important. The N5200 actually doesn't work! There is a firmware bug in the initial batch so you can't create arrays with more then 3 500gig and larger drives. Also there seems to be some NFS issues, some Samba issues, and general ACL issues with this . Also I noticed all the disk LED's are whacked (different colors). I suspect this is all firmware related issues. After hacking away at it for a couple days I got the arrays to work with beta quality firmware then these guys were able to force thecus to give them. By god if it weren't for the level of support I got from these guys over the weekend, I would have a dead box. Right now as it stands with the firmware I have, the system has all 5 500gig drives working at raid 5. I've tested drive failure by removing a drive and inserting a new drive and it does indeed recover without loss of data. You even still have access to write and read your array while its rebuilding! Not that I would recommend writing to it. Transfer rates are awesome. I would say roughly 22megabyte / sec write and about 35 read. I think their ad's are a little on the optimistic side. All in all I'm happy with the product and I trust it enough to retire my old thecus N4100. I really do prefer this solution over a DIY because of the extensive use of smart info, ability for hot swap, easy to replace drive trays, and independent from my system. Don't get me wrong, its nice to have a raid in my server if I needed 24x7 access to high speed near line storage but for home use, I'd rather have an array I can copy my movies, mp3's, etc to and turn it off when I'm not using it. The N5200 also features soft shutdown. The old n4100 simply powered the drives off. I have never lost any data with the n4100 by not doing a clean shutdown but then again all my drives in all my arrays have write back cache turned off and I never just power it off immediatly after a write. For me its mainly read only. All in all I must say I'm impressed with the N5200. Its fast, economical. Not the quietest but its ok. Its not all that bad unless your super picky. Hands down I'd take the N5200 over the N4100 any day even if they were selling the N4100 for $200. Watch out guys for ebay, people are gonna try to unload them before the N5200 really takes off. I think the company I refered to above still has a few of these so grab em while you can before they become back ordered. -- andyman_sf ------------------------------------------------------------------------ andyman_sf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6872 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=25784 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
