Thecus N5200 NAS Review

Installation

The installation of Thecus N5200 is very straight-forward. Install the hard disk drives, connect your network cable, turn the unit on and you are ready to perform the basic setup. The problem is that there are two Ethernet ports (one WAN and one LAN) and they are not labeled; use the lower one.

As we have shown, the unit is a small computer. Thus you need to wait until it has loaded its operating system in order to be able to use it. Thecus N5200 will emit one beep after you turn it on and another beep after it has loaded its operating system and it is ready for use.

The unit comes pre-configured to use IP address 192.168.1.100. The use of a fixed IP address has its advantages and disadvantages. The main disadvantage is that your local network must be in the 192.168.1.x range for you to be able to find the unit and configure it. If your router configured your network to the 192.168.0.x or 10.0.0.x (or similar) range you will have to change this. Also, you will have to make sure that no computer is using 192.168.1.100 address, which unfortunately wasn’t our case: our Linksys router default configuration is to assign IPs starting at 192.168.1.100, so we had our computer using the same IP address as the NAS box and, because of that, we couldn’t reach it. The solution was simply entering the router’s control panel and change the option called “Starting IP Address” from 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.2. This made our PC to get a lower address, resolving the conflict.

On the other hand, the advantage of using a fixed IP address is that it will never change and thus all configurations you make on the client PCs will never have to be changed in order to access the file server. You, however, can configure N5200 to get an IP address from your DHCP server (i.e., your broadband router), though we don’t recommend this (this is done at Network, WAN).

Solving this initial issue we could enter the NAS control panel by opening its IP address on our internet browser (https://192.168.1.100). Its default login and password is “admin” for both fields.

After entering the control panel for the first time, it is strongly recommended that you upgrade the system firmware before doing anything else. This can be done by downloading the latest firmware from the manufacturer’s website to your PC and then choosing the appropriate option (System, Firmware Upgrade) from the product’s control panel to upload the file to the NAS box. In our case we upgraded from version 2.00.04 to version 2.00.10 and that is the version we used during our tests. After this procedure the box will need to reboot.

In Figure 9 we show all configuration options available on Thecus N5200.

Figure 9: Thecus N5200 control panel.

It is impossible to us to cover in details all options available, as our goal isn’t to write a tutorial on how to use Thecus N5200 – this is the purpose of the product manual.

At this point you will need to build your RAID array – with this unit you can select the RAID stripe size from 4 KB to 4,096 KB. Go to Storage, RAID, select your disks and the RAID level you want to use, wait for the unit to build the array and it will be ready to be used.

You will have to create your own folders using the product’s control panel (Storage, Folder) in order to start using the product. For example, you may want to create a folder called “videos” to store and share videos, “music” to store and share MP3 and similar files, “images” to store and share images and so on.