Thecus N5200 is really a high-end NAS box target to users that want a NAS solution with above-the-average performance. Here is a summary of what we found about this NAS box.

Strong Points

• LCD display
• RAID6 support
• Faster than other NAS products
• Outstanding write performance
• Case with aluminum cover, giving a very professional looks to the product (the internal chassis is made of steel though).

Weak Points

• Sharp metal is used on the hard disk drive drawers; we cut ourselves when installing the hard disk drives.
• Doesn’t come with the necessary screws to fasten the hard disk drives.
• No label identifying which one is the WAN and which was is the LAN port.
• Far more expensive than mainstream NAS products.

This product is recommended for the home or office user that manipulates large files and wants a high-performance NAS box and doesn’t mind paying more for that. For the average user, however, there are products that offer a better cost/benefit ratio, like Thecus N3200, which costs half the price of N5200’s.

Keep in mind that if you don’t have a Gigabit network and don’t plan to migrate to this speed then you can buy the cheapest NAS box you can find, since performance will be limited by your network; all NAS boxes achieve the same performance level on a 100 Mbps network.