I am about to buy a thecus n5550. Do any of you care to share your experience with this NAS? I will just archive the photos and also use it as a download center.
I have a QNAP NAS and would not recommend it. Hardware is great but support and their firmware/security is an issue. Just check their forum and you'll see what I mean. I will be switching to Synology soon. Here's a great place to start if you are evaluating NAS's:
I have two different Synology NAS systems and they work great. I have over 30 years experience in the high tech field, so know a thing or two about NAS and other storage mechanisms. After doing my research, I selected Synology and have been very pleased. Reliable, easy to manage, easy to maintain, etc. I have had to replace a failed disk in a RAID, and it was pretty painless. I have also had to expand a RAID by replacing existing disks with larger ones. Again, pretty painless.
I have been using Synology NAS systems for 2 or 3 years and never had a need to test their customer service.
There are other good solutions, but for my money, I have been really happy with Synology.
Been using an HP Mediasmart Windows Home Server box for NAS use (and other things). Had a bit of a scare with it and did the legwork to figure out what it's successor will be and decided on Synology. No other company seems to be as consistently well-regarded by its customers. Luckily I managed to rescue the WHS box (just a system drive, recoverd automatically without loosing any data)
I've been using my Thecus 7700Pro now for approx. two years without a glitch.
I'm not using any internal storage at all, since the network speed for reading/writing (large) files (via AFP = apple share) exceeds the 100MB every time. I've got it configured with 7x2TB discs (WD RE4): 3 discs in RAID5 for generic storage and a 4 disc RAID10 set for my vSphere storage.
I can highly recommended Thecus storage, but like others posters say other brands like QNap or Synology can also perform quite wel.
I have two of the older Thecus 5 bay RAID boxes. When I needed more capacity I bough the 8 Bay Synology (they have a bay). At the time it was about $1000 unpopulated. The Synology is a much better system in several ways.
The service is awesome! Need anything and it's there the next day at your doorstep. Have a Question and talk to a human immediately who knows WTH they're talking about. etc.. I needed a key for the drive bays and they sent me two for each drive. Manual, boom! there!
I got mine when someone was cleaning out their office and had no use for it any longer. - so a freebee. I guess it's worth a lot by looking at that spec-sheet catalogue there.
It's super easy to setup and use, that's for sure.
