Ciro Principe

IT Manager, Consultant & Programmer

Blog » A new NAS is in da house

I was running out of available space on my old, double drive (2 x 2TB) external disk, so I bought a new couple of hard drives (2 x 4TB) and found a deal for an old Thecus N5200 BR on a forum I visit frequently.

It’s a 5 disks SOHO NAS with an integrated Gigabit switch and some USB ports. The original firmware of the N5200 doesn’t support hard drives bigger than 1TB, so I investigated the possibility to install a custom Linux and found a lot of links of people who did it with success. I bought it.

The hardware isn’t top notch, but a Celeron-M 600 and 256 MB of DDR are quite adeguate for a file server. The RAM can be replaced, so can be the internal 64 MB DOM. I opted for a Debian Wheezy (oldstable) installed on a usb flash drive.

After installing the system I wrote a couple of scripts to make use (sorta) of the leds, the lcd and the buttons. Everything related to this small project it’s on GitHub.

Maybe I will detail all the steps next time…