I am happy using this NAS until……
Yesterday, the THECUS NAS5200 started to beep, I went on the web interface and found out that the RAID status was “damaged” and asked me to solve the disk problem. However, NO physical disks were reported failure. I tried to do a reboot, just to be sure that the problem won’t be solved by itself doing a reboot and when the system went back online, the Raid 5 configuration was gone……………………
I am contacting the vendor’s technical support for possible solutions. Luckily that I really don’t trust the NAS a lot. Most of the stuff I put in it was the backup of my data (I put my critical data on a pair of disk running RAID1 using ICH10R) except some very old stuff (5 to 6 years ago). Of course it is still a pity to lost them but the impact was already minimal to me.
Since the NAS is blackbox to me, there’s really nothing I can do if it has problem. Therefore, I always prefer full box storage solution instead of NAS if you need to run a RAID 5 configuration. In my opinion, it is still OK to run RAID 1 usinig NAS since at the worst case say the NAS hardware failure, RAID configuration lost, etc, I can still unplug the disk and read back the data somewhere. Usually the disk should be formatted with FAT32, NTFS, EXT3 or ZFS, etc, I should be to use different OS to handle it.
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