NAS: Thecus W5810 w/ReFS Review | Tek Syndicate

Level1Techs
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The Thecus W5810! Windows Server 2012R2 runs on this thing. Yes, that's right. It's the OEM/StorageServer version, but no CALs are required for this device.

It has HDMI out, audio out and two gigabit ethernet ports. It also has a plurality of USB3.0 ports.

Top Storage for 1-50 Employee Business - Office 365 & Microsoft Azure: Cloud Service Integration - Active Directory Domain Services: Scalable, Secure User Management - Data Deduplication: Performance Optimization - Enhanced Boot Drive: Embedded SSD - Windows License Included - Intel® Celeron™ J1900 Quad-Core Processor - 4GB DDR3 RAM

http://wss.thecus.com/product_W5810.php?ref=teksyndicate

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://teksyndicate.com/videos/nas-thecus-w5810-wrefs-review
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Placeholder. Also buy now!

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Was expecting much worse of a price.

Still bad.

I was thinking of getting something like this to test the waters for a home server. But the price, they are all so high, building would be a better option it seems.

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Cool stuff, like the small form factor and found the linux version here https://teksyndicate.com/videos/thecus-n5810-pro-no-headache-nas-storage-wlinux

I need a good home server but what is holding me back is wanting a small form factor with small percentage dedicated to redundancy. In my mind I see the ideal config as 8 or 12 2.5 drives in a raid-6 config. That would mean a high tolerance of failure and around 25% or less of storage used for redundancy.

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some thing like this:

would clearly make a better NAS it only has 3 sata ports but you can add more using the pci-e slots.

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For people that want windows server features like dfs this thing is a steal. But if you just need a network attach hard drive then yeah

Have seen Lenovo reinvented Xeon servers around the same price byo os tho

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Wendell, I think I heard you specifically say in the video that you would not recommend deploying an Azure AD server for LDAP authentication alongside a unit such as this for small businesses.

I work for an IT MSP and was considering doing exactly this as a solution for our smallish clients that don't need a full server costing $3k - $5k. The company I work with is an MS partner and is not interested in *nix solutions (we just don't have enough linux knowledge in house right now) so that's not really an option. I was originally thinking Synology for this, but I thought this would be an easier sell since it runs Windows. Can you elaborate on why you would recommend against this plus Azure LDAP for small (5-20 user) environments?

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My experience has been that Azure AD is basically getting to be ok as long as your operations masters are "local" and the Azure AD is effectively a replica. A $500 machine would be fine for local AD. Real-world in a mixed enviornment with win7/win8 lots of weird things whould happen.

One thing with win10+azure ad was that win10 appaernetly applies GPO continulously and when azure or the internet connection is being weird, the workstations can get in an impossible situation where WMI would hang and then it would be days later and things would still be messed up.

Deploying local operations masters fixed this. I may not have 100% if the details right may have to check with the team on the details on this.

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Operations master = domain controller, essentially?

Can you run WSS 2012 R2 as a DC? Or are you proposing running a DC on a separate consumer grade box alongside the thecus?

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Okay, I looked this up a bit.... have a better idea of the difference between an operations master and a DC. I'm not a sysadmin or anything yet so I'm still picking a lot of this stuff up.

Point being, though - you can't use the thecus unit as an operations master (I assume), and it's kinda flaky running it in Azure, so you're saying you would need this unit plus Azure for LDAP / DC, plus a consumer-grade box to act as operations master that would be replicated in Azure? is that about right?

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