Introduction

We would like to thank Thecus for supplying the review sample.

Thecus was founded in 2004, and their main focus is on developing innovative storage solutions that keep your data safe. They are currently among the top companies in networking storage solutions, and expert reviewers and users around the world consider their NAS servers to be among the best. Today, we have the chance to test a Thecus product after having had one of their offerings on hand for a very long time, and we hope that we will now be in a position to bring you Thecus product reviews much more often.

The N5550 we are testing in this review is a five-bay NAS equipped with a dual-core Atom processor, so it will easily handle the needs of a small business environment while obviously fully covering an enthusiast user that will buy it for use at home. This NAS is probably one of the few in its category that is equipped with 2 GB of DDR3 RAM and all the usual features a contemporary high-end NAS ought to have, including a USB 3.0 port, HDMI, VGA, audio-out ports, and an LCD display. Its other interesting feature allows you to directly back your NAS data up to CD, DVD, or Blu-ray disc via the Data Burn module using an external optical or network drive. This is indeed a pretty cool feature, though many of you will most likely never exploit it since HDDs are much cheaper storage solutions. However, the former are more reliable since even SSDs can fail and lead to data loss.