The Thecus N2560, is a two-bay NAS best for the prosumer/SOHO set. It's got some business features, and data redundancy capabilities with its support for RAID 0 and 1 (for more on RAID, you can click "RAID Levels Explained"). However, with its Spartan user interface, accompanying software that froze on me quite often, and a sloppy drive recovery process makes this a middling NAS product—and one that's overpriced to boot.

Specs
I was intrigued by the specs of the device. It ships with an Intel Atom SoC CE5335 processor and a generous 2GB of DDR3 RAM. The device ships diskless at a street price of $329.

For that price, I was surprised how flimsy and cheap the device looks. It's built mainly of plastic. There aren't even any metal drive rails to hold the only drives it supports, which are 3.5 inch SATAs. Instead, a plastic strip fits into the holes on each side of a SATA HDD and they help guide the drives into the backplane. It's a cheap solution for seating drives into bays. I also noticed that on my test unit, that the plastic drive bay door would not remain shut.

On the rear panel are two USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, an HDMI port for multimedia output, and an SPDIF port for digital audio. The front panel has LEDs for each drive and network connection status; a one-touch backup/copy button, and a USB 3.0 port.

Thecus Setup
The NAS ships with a Quick Install guide and it comes with the shortest set of setup instructions I've seen with a NAS. The guide gives you steps on inserting HDDs, connecting a cable, and then the URL for installing the software. That's it.

You have to download the Intelligent NAS software for Windows or Mac. It's a quick install and the software discovered my test Thecus on my network. However, the software got messy from then on.

I installed it on a Windows 7 machine. When the software detected my NAS on the network, I clicked on the image of the Thecus I saw on-screen (you are not given any wizards or real hand-holding when setting this thing up, you are pretty much as a user, on your own). I was presented with the option of manually or automatically configuring RAID. No matter which option I selected, I saw the same following message box, "The system has detected existing data on the installed hard drives please click "Continue" to carry on system initial process, all data will be erased. System initialization may take five minutes to complete. Or click "Shutdown" to power off system and replace a new hard drive."

After about an hour of clicking all of these above offered options, and getting the same message, I did not know what state the NAS was in as far as a RAID and volume build. I finally manually powered off the box and then went back into the Intelligent NAS software. This time, I received the message, "Operating system boot fail."

Now, I did have existing data on the drives I installed. This is typically not a problem when I test NASes, because the drives will get formatted and then the RAID volume builds. Since that did not seem to be happening with the N2560, I instead installed two new Western Digital Red drives with no data on them.

When you first setup the N2560, the quick install guide provides a link to a listing of all the HDDs the N2560 supports. I confirmed that the initial drives I installed were for consumer-grade use as I did not have the types of drives listed for best business-case use on hand. I also confirmed the Western Digital Red drives were supported, at least for consumer use.

After installing the Red drives, I saw the on-screen message "Processing" after I clicked to setup RAID. After about five minutes, the system emitted a long beep and once I refreshed the Intelligent NAS interface, I was prompted to login to the admin interface.

The configuration of the RAID array was sloppy. After accessing the interface with the default admin account, a big warning message flashed stating that Thecus would not responsible for any data loss. Not the reassuring warning you want to see from the manufacturer of your NAS, but, given my drive-configuration debacle, I wasn't too surprised.