Thecus N5810 NAS review - Introduction

Thecus N5810 NAS

We review the all new N5810, this is a Linux based NAS unit from Thecus that is price competitive while offering great performance and features. Armed with an Intel Celeron quad-core 2.0 GHz based processor and 4GB of memory and the ability to upgrade to 8GB, this unit rocks hard with its 5 HDD bays. Power consumption sits at just 15 to 20 Watts with one HDD for this mini-me version of a home server.

While the dynamics have changed rapidly over the past few years, our demand for massive volume storage capacity has increased. With the help of WiFi and Gigabit Ethernet in general in our homes; we started evolving in our lifestyle and thus requirements. It's exactly in the lifestyle segments where the latest NAS units come in. NAS units are really small handy servers that not only function as storage devices, they are getting more functionality combined with ease of use as well. With prices going down, and everybody having high-speed Gigabit LAN Ethernet at home the market is slowly adapting and targeting NAS devices at a hard to convince and very money attentive consumer. One of the companies out there making a really good effort in offering you a handy and more affordable NAS unit is Thecis. We armed the N5810 with new (non-public) Beta ThecusOS 7.0 firmware and get a massively updated GUI in return. So yes we tested a unit priced competitive against the big guns in the industry like Qnap, Synology and Netgear. We went blank into this review as we never had tested their Linux version before, but armed with very good hardware and an excellent software suite the NAS is not only a fast file server, it's loaded with applications and media functionality as well. Today's tested model NAS unit has five swappable HDD bays, full RAID functionality, Gigabit Ethernet, USB (2.0/3.0) and then a heap of software functionality that blows you away completely. I mean this puppy can download torrents, has an FTP server, a MySQL server, a WWW server and well anything with the word server mentioned in it. It's compatible with major OSes including APPs you can use on your smart-phone, all combined with user and group based management, yeah a proper NAS. As you will observe the Thecus N5810 is the little brother of the Thecus N5810 PRO, the PRO model has a tiny UPS built in + some xtra other features, so the Thecus N5810 is slightly trimmed yet shares the similar DNA.

The Thecus N5810 has an implausible amount of tricks in it, from file-sharing, to usenet or torrent downloading, towards being a fully fetched CMS server, hey man whatever you need is served and it's doing so with an Intel Celeron J1900 2.0/2.41 Turbo GHz quad-core based box and a standard 4GB of memory. Power consumption sits at 15 to 20 Watts with one HDD. 

So yeah, have a peek and then lets head into the review.