Thecus W5810 5-bay NAS review

The W5810 is a very well built NAS and thanks to its metal chassis and cover it is no lightweight either – weighing in at a hefty 5Kg. The front bezel is made of good quality plastic. There is no drive bay cover door, giving easy access to the drive trays. With good physical security in mind Thecus has added decent locks to the drive trays.  Sitting under the drives is a two line LCD display which shows system status and warning messages with four buttons to use to navigate through any options.

To the left of the drive bay are five vertically stacked indicator LEDs, one of the three USB 3.0 ports and the power button. For the indicator LEDs, Thecus has forsaken any fancy colours and gone with plain white although if there is a system error the system LED changes to red. From the top down the five indicators are; power, two LAN, USB activity and system status.

 
Both side panels have a good area of ventilation cut into them, helping to keep both the motherboard and drive bays cool.

The rear panel has the grill for the 92mm cooling fan (ADDA AD09212UB257B00) at its centre. To the right of the grill sit all the ports. From the top down these are; line out, HDMI, two more USB 3.0 ports, two USB2.0 ports and a pair of Ethernet ports. Finally, there is the integrated power supply in the base of the unit. The Enhance Electronics ENP-7020D is a 200W Flex-ATX 80plus power supply.

 
Like the NAS itself, the drive trays are constructed from metal with plastic tray doors which have activity/warning LEDs built in. The trays support both 3.5in and 2.5in drives with both sizes being secured from the underside of the trays with screws that are provided.

Once the cover is removed (held in place by three screws) you are confronted by the vertically mounted compact motherboard on one side of the chassis next to the drive cage, but of more interest is what sits on top of the cage – an SSD. The W5810 uses a 64GB ADATA SP600 (MLC NAND, JMicron JMF661 controller) drive to hold the Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials OS.

Sitting in the middle of the board is an Intel Celeron J1900 Quad-Core processor which runs at 2.00GHz (burst up to 2.42GHz). With a TDP of just 10W,  the 22nm J1900 only needs passive cooling. Sitting above the CPU are a pair of SO-DIMM slots. The W5810 comes with 4GB of DDR3 (Transcend 699086-1076 DDR3L-1600 in the review sample) as standard installed in one slot but should you need more memory, 8GB is the maximum the W5810 supports.

The Celeron J1900 provides support for the two USB 2.0 and one of the three USB 3.0 ports, the other two being looked after by an Asmedia AGM1042A IC. A pair of Intel WGI21controllers look after the two Ethernet ports while a Realtek ALC662 provides 5.1 audio support. The four SATA interfaces are controlled by a Marvell 88SE9215-NAA2 chip.

Physical Specifications
Processor: Intel Celeron J1900 Quad-Core
Memory: 4GB DDR3L 1600
Gigabit Ethernet Ports: 2
Rear panel connectors: 2 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0, 1 x HDMI
Front panel connectors: 1 x USB 3.0
RAID support: Windows Storage Spaces
Cooling : 1 x 92mm
Maximum hard drive size supported: 10TB
Maximum Capacity: 50TB
Dimensions (D x W x H) 240 x 190 x 230 mm.
Weight kg. 5.09

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