Thecus Readies Their New N5500 NAS Device

Born from their successful N5200 series of NAS devices comes Thecus’ new N5500 Network Attaches Storage (NAS) device. This burly new product addresses a lot of the shortcomings of their previous products with the introduction of a new AJAX based web interface that, unlike the old interface, doesn’t infuriate new users and makes even veterans reach for the instruction manual. Or so we hope.

The new devices still gives you five hot swappable drive bays and officially supports up to 2TB drives for a whopping 10 TB of storage. You can configure that storage as either RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and JBOD so your storage amount will vary depending on the RAID level chosen. It also features online RAID expansion and migration and even multiple RAID volumes. Also on the list is the iSCSI feature introduced with the N5200PRo.

The N5500 also features added reliability with something called Dual-DOM which I assume is some sort of monitoring system for advanced hardware failure warning based on a very limited description. I’m not even sure what “DOM” stands for because it doesn’t say on their product page. Whatever it is, there’s two of them because they’re “dual”.

The unit will be fitted with an INTEL CPU and networking duties are carried out by dual Gigabit ethernet ports that feature load balancing, failover, and link aggregation with 802.3ad. Support for iTunes server, photo web server, and a media server which supports uPNP. The device does tout Windows and LINUX support but the Futurrelooks Crew will have to see about the OSX support as previous models were somewhat glitchy on the Mac front.

More information can be found at the Thecus Website.