Thecus N0503 Combo NAS Has Split Hard Drive Personality

The new Thecus N0503 Combo NAS has a unique feature that no other NAS on the market has. It’s the ability to use both 2.5 inch notebook drives and 3.5 inch desktop drives. An ingenious caddy inside the unit allows you to stack up to five of the 2.5 inch buggers sideways into the machine or three regular 3.5 inch drives on top of each other. As you may have figured out, you can’t mix the drives. With SSD’s dropping in price (but not quickly enough), one can only imagine the future possibilities.

Thecus NAS products have always been quite powerful and this one is no exception. It sports an Intel® ATOM™ CPU and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. It supports multiple RAID modes including RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and JBOD are selectable, and auto volume rebuild, hot swap and hot spare capabilities. It also has an iTunes server, a photo web server, and uPnP AV streaming. A download server is also available for late night torrenting and It’ll even do work as an IP camera surveillance server.

In the past, Thecus NAS servers suffered from a really un-user friendly interface. Recently, they introduced a new AJAX based GUI that should hopefully win some new converts. Although this new machine does look quite attractive in a “Mac” sort of way, it still lacks true support for things like Time Machine Backups; a feature that other companies like NetGear and SYNOLOGY have already or are close to releasing.

More information about this new product can be found right here.