The Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro is a five-bay NAS with good hardware, but unless you like taking apart the hardware to install third-party software, there are better options for Apple owners.
Network-attached storage (NAS) is more than its hardware, and the number of bays it has. It's simply not possible for anyone to just buy a NAS without having to check out what other features it can do beyond just storage.
With AI becoming a hot topic in tech, it's also becoming part of more onboard features.
The Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro tries to meet the modern app-based approach while also providing a lot of usable storage to consumers. It's a promising approach.
In some areas, it does well. But it isn't entirely plain sailing for this particular NAS model.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: Physical design
When it comes to the hardware, Orico has done well here. It's a solid aluminum construction, with a rounded tube forming the main body, and access is provided from the front and back.
At 8.7 inches long by 5.7 inches wide and 9.1 inches long, it has the same sort of dimensions of your usual four to five-bay NAS. Its modern appearance won't throw anyone off the scent of it being a NAS, but at least Orico accepts what it is instead of making it look like something trying not to be a bunch of drives in an enclosure.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: Front cover removed
The front cover is attached by magnets and pulls away to provide access to the drive bays, complete with a power button just below it. The easy access is a plus, but most of the rest of the NAS fielders have this figured out, too.
Around the back is venting for the dual fans, as well as the ports used to connect to the unit.
The fans are quiet enough, sitting at about 45 dBa when the NAS is under load, at a meter away. This noise is mostly drive chatter.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: Storage
The full name of the NAS says it is a five-bay device, meaning it can take up to five SATA hard drives or SSDs. It can support drives up to 22 terabytes in capacity, so it has a total capacity of 110 terabytes, before considering formatting or RAID configurations.
However, while they are easily accessible from the front, it's not the zero-tool approach other manufacturers have taken with consumer network devices in recent years. Instead, you're stuck using a screwdriver to fix your drives in place with screws. That's not really a deal-breaker.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review:Drive bays
While it is described as a five-bay device, you can actually install seven drives into it. In the base are a pair of M.2 NVMe slots, which can each hold 8TB.
This is a handy addition, especially when considering the possibility of combining faster storage allocations with slower versions. It also means you can get up to 126 terabytes of storage in a single unit, which is a massive amount in a consumer network appliance.
That base cover also hides another neat configurable element. It also hides access to the RAM slots.
It ships with 8GB of DDR4 memory, though you could easily replace the memory with more placed into the pair of slots provided, if you need more of it.
A 32GB eMMC is used for the system software, so it's not a user-accessible section. It's also not usable for data storage.
For configuring the storage itself, you have a few options. The easiest is Basic, which gives you full access to all of the drives, without dealing with any RAID configurations at all.
If you need RAID 0 striping, RAID 1 mirroring, RAID 5's block-level parity, or RAID 10's striped mirrors, you have these fairly typical options available to you.
There's also LVM, or Local Volume Mapping, which can be used to create pools of storage with varying properties. If you're someone who needs to more finely tune their storage settings, this is a very nice option.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: Connectivity
When it comes to ports, the external selection is solid and quite conventional.
That starts with a pair of 2.5-gigabit Ethernet ports for connecting to the network. More ports mean more potential bandwidth for the NAS, which is great for creatives working over the network.
It may not be 10Gbps, but we aren't expecting that at this price point. The equivalent 5Gbps of network bandwidth is great, if you have the infrastructure to handle it.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: Port selection
The other ports include a pair of USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, as well as one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C. This is all useful for data ingestion and allowing third-party drives to work as extra capacity.
The external port selection is rounded out by one HDMI connection. It is designed to manage the NAS, and that's about it.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: Features
Powering the performance of the HS500 is an Intel Celeron N5105, a four-core chip with clock speeds of up to 2.9GHz and integrated Intel UHD Graphics.
It's a chip that is made with a very low thermal design point of just 10 watts. It's a chip that was designed to run cool, for use in tablets, so its use here for a storage appliance is an expected choice.
As a chip for everyday use of a NAS, it should be decent enough, especially if you're expecting it to be used for file storage primarily. If you're expecting to do any more intensive processing tasks here, you may find it runs a little slow at times.
On the software side, it's running on the CyberData OS. In our experience with the NAS, it's a fairly basic operating system that is extremely non-intuitive.
Worse, though, it lacks some of the advanced features of other NAS systems.
The operating system does have some features, like independent local accounts, as well as automated backups of your hardware, including Time Machine support.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: With the power brick
It also has an offline download manager, online document collaboration, remote file extraction, and a local AI-powered photo gallery, like a personal version of Photos.
On this last point, the AI photo tagging capability is not great. And, in our trials, this was extremely, profoundly slow, and we don't recommend it.
For advanced users, there is support for Plex, Jellyfin, and Docker. In theory, the media handling and home server needs can be met, but we recommend more RAM for all of this.
There's also the problem of transparency, as in a lack of it. There would usually be assurances of the kinds of security the NAS has, but that's not really forthcoming from Orico here.
All of this software is called Cyberdata by Orico, which appears to be based on the open source OpenWRT. We used an earlier version of predecessor Weline personally some time ago, and it was absolutely terrible then.
It's not terrible now, but it's not good. Central administration is an issue, as it relies on individual users to manage their own accounts.
We watched traffic to and from the MetaCube TS500, and there's nothing untoward going anyplace strange. That's as expected, and not a bonus.
Frankly, if you're going to buy the unit for the hardware, expect to have to install something like TrueNAS. You'll just have to disassemble the unit to access the internal ports to do it.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: A software letdown
Picking a NAS often has users determining if they want to go big on storage, if they want to lean on the capabilities beyond storage, or if they want something simple that does the job.
The Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro thinks it wants to be the feature-filled device, when really it's the capacity option.
There's a lot of flexibility here, certainly, when it comes to setting up your storage, and for the sheer number of drives you can pack into the thing. As a basic NAS, there could be a lot to like here.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: Full rear view
The seams start to buckle when it comes to the software side. Yes, Docker is great, but the included software with dodgy and very slow AI image tagging paired with a non-intuitive OS interface doesn't help matters.
Having to take it apart to install an alternative OS is a strange hill to die on. That just gets in the way, since even medium-skill users will want to do this in short order.
The Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro desperately wants to be an all-singing, all-dancing option for consumers to add to their network. It could be that out of the box if the quality of the software matched the quality of the hardware.
It just doesn't right now.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: Pros
- Strong chassis construction
- Good enough performance for daily storage tasks
- Excellent Docker support
- Expandable RAM
- Versatile RAID configuration options.
Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro review: Cons
- CyberData OS is basic, non-intuitive, and lacks advanced features.
- Heavy dependency on proprietary apps.
- Lack of transparency on software security.
- Not tool-free
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
If I was just rating this on hardware, it would be a 4 out of 5. The software is just not great, gets a score of 2 out of 5, and more difficult than it needs to be to replace.
Unless you like the tinkering process, this is probably one to skip. If you're a hobbyist that is willing to get your hands dirty, like I can be, the hardware is worth the purchase.
This hardware is a rare example of a review unit that we get to keep for a while, and not return to the vendor immediately after the review is complete. If the software situation improves, and it might given the changes between Weline before and Cyberdata now, we'll update this review.
Where to buy the Orico HS500 MetaBox Pro
The Orico HS500 Metabox Pro is available from Amazon for $419.99. It is also available from Orico directly, also for $419.99.
