Category: Thecus

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Update: Thecus N5200 – RAID Repair

Well, I have to admit: I am one lucky guy. I have been running a truly degraded RAID array since day one of my experience with the N5200. To get up to speed you may want to read my other post about the device: Thecus N5200 Review

So, today my replacement hard drive arrived for a failure I noticed recently. I took a look at the RAID and double checked the reason for the replacement. My #2 drive was showing some bad sectors and was listed as a ‘warning’. Not a failed drive but a drive on the way. Better safe then sorry I thought.… Click here to read more!

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The Wheels of Progress

Well, It’s been a while hasn’t it? Let me wipe the cob webs of the site (and the servers, but thats another post) and mention a couple of things I have in the works. First off, my Thecus N5200 has been having some trouble lately and I think it’s something that needs to be posted about. As it turns out the web interface for the product is severely lacking and does not in any way provide adequate data about the array’s health. Look for a scathing post about that coming up…

In other (better) news Apple has released some new software (iLife 08,iWork 08) and updated both the Mac Mini and the iMac.… Click here to read more!

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Followup: Thecus N5200

Well, I have my first real drive failure on my hands. The array has been running for a few months now (though not without issue), and when I logged into it the other day I noticed I have a drive on the fritz. The array did not send me an email telling me about the issue but that could be understandable as the array is not currently degraded, I just have a drive with a few errors. I will place an order for a new disk and go through the process of replacing it. The manual says all I need to do is pull the bad drive and pop in a new good one.… Click here to read more!

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Review: Thecus N5200

I’ve had this device for about 6 weeks now and at this point I think I’m ready to post a fair review. The Thecus N5200 is essentially a NAS RAID box. It’s built around a Intel Celeron 600Mhz chip and runs linux. It holds 5 SATA drives up to 750GB which was is the largest available when I bought the unit (It may have been updated to support larger drives by now). Not being a glutton I installed 5 500GB drives in a RAID 5 giving me about 2TB of storage once it is all is setup. Unfortunatly one of my drives was faulty on arrival though so I had to do a bit of extra waiting before I could really start to use the unit.… Click here to read more!

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New Raid Array

In a not so distant past I had 1.5 Terabytes of storage on one of my servers. That array met with it’s sad end one day and all my data was lost. I had bought a raid card and 6 250GB Western Digital drives(I know, thats not 1.5TB the server had some other storage not on that array). The drives didn’t do well in the array and needed to be reinitialized every couple of weeks. It is now a well know issue with certain WD drives in RAID arrays. The card I bought was also not as good a choice as I had hoped.… Click here to read more!