External Evaluation
Video: Thecus N5200B Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review - Storage 39

Video: Thecus N5200B Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review - Storage 40

The Thecus N5200 NAS measures about 9-in tall and deep and about 7.5-in wide and will likely be confused for a really small computer by the uninitiated.  Without hard drives installed it still has some weight to it and it is built in a sturdy fashion.  It should be able to take some abuse and live to tell about it.

On the front of the unit you’ll see the five removable hard drive trays, diagnostic LEDs, power and reset button, informational LED display and some buttons to navigate through the information.  

Video: Thecus N5200B Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review - Storage 41

On the back of the N5200 there is a 100mm fan for hot air exhaust as well as a smaller fan with the power supply at the bottom.  There are two USB ports and an eSATA port for storage expansion and adding drives that will show up as additional distributable storage and a single USB B-style port that can be used as network printer server.  Below that is a serial port and two Gigabit network ports; one for LAN and one for a WAN connection.

Video: Thecus N5200B Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review - Storage 42

The five hard drive bays are lockable to prevent someone from maliciously or accidently removing a hard drive from the system. 

Video: Thecus N5200B Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review - Storage 43

Here you can see one of the 5 bays opened revealing a Western Digital Raptor 150GB hard drive.

Video: Thecus N5200B Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review - Storage 44

The diagnostic LED gives the user a lot of good information without forcing them to login to the administration console or in case of a networking error will allow you to set it up on screen as well.

Video: Thecus N5200B Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review - Storage 45

Video: Thecus N5200B Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review - Storage 46

The LED will tell you what disk drives are populated – here only the third bay is missing a drive.

Video: Thecus N5200B Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review - Storage 47

If a task is being competed on the NAS its status will be reported here as well.  Here you can see we are doing a migration from one RAID type to another.

Video: Thecus N5200B Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review - Storage 48

The lights on the left indicate LAN connectivity, migration, error status and there is yet another USB port as well.  On the right hand side you can see lights for each drive bay to indicate that a drive is installed and if data is being read/written to it. 

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