by the way, here are the pictures of my Thecus 5200 Pro opened and worked through.
After a while I finally got my hand on the 44 pin IDE male to male adapter and could put Debian on my Thecus, with serial redirection it was actually quite trivial to get everything up and running. As most people suggest, I installed everything on a flash chip on another computer and then moved it to the Thecus. Besides some issues with udev ( my nics got renamed, of course, DOH! ) everything was working smoothly. With serial access I changed the nics and then I was able to put Apache, SSH, etc. on the box and access it.
The box has 2x Intel 1 gbit eth interfaces and one of those is connected directly to a 4 port gbit switch. So far I can say the Thecus is quite decent, cooling, casing, etc. looks / seem very well done - the firmware is already quite nice, but still needs some improvements. You need to reboot for an IP change for example, or if DHCP fails, some services seem to act weird, even though DHCP is only possible / done on the WAN interface. Generally is working well and there is quite a decent list of modules to extend the functionallity.
What is a bit annoying: the front display. There is not much documentation and the one avaiable doesn´t seem to cover all the things. I suppose I have to play around with strace on the off shelf firmware and see how one could put data on it. Obviously its done via a serial connection, but that ends in a ATMEL controller and from there it goes parallel to the display or well, that is what it looks like. Once I know more, I will post again here about that.
And one more: what is a bit of a shame though, is that the chip of the Thecus has 8 SATA ports and only 5 are actually useable, I suppose sooner or later there will be even a bigger Thecus with more HDDs. Yeah, Cebit is coming up, maybe they have a Joker somewhere.
