| Thecus N5550 NAS Network Storage Server |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Network | |
| Written by Bruce Normann | |
| Monday, 24 September 2012 | |
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Thecus N5550 NAS Server Review
Manufacturer: Thecus Technology Corporation Full disclosure: The product used in this review was supplied by Thecus If Forrest is right, and life is like a box of chocolates - i.e. you never know what you're going to get until you bite into it, then NAS devices are definitely like that box of chocolates. You just never know....... Fortunately, this Thecus N5550 turned out to be Benchmark Reviews' favorite flavor - FAST. The Thecus N5550 is aimed right at the typical small business owner or advanced home user, by virtue of its size and its form factor. With five bays you can have both capacity and redundancy with RAID 5 on a three, four, or five disk array. Want RAID 6 or RAID 10? There are good reasons to do so, and the N5550 supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, and JBOD with no trouble at all; plus RAID migration is available, too. The diskless model made it easy to utilize the same drives I have used during previous benchmark testing. I also wanted to test the ability to expand the storage size and migrate from a single disk to RAID 1 and then to RAID 5. In short, I wanted to get my hands dirty.... 
The Thecus N5550 uses one of the newest Intel Atom Dual-Core CPUs, ticking over at 1.86 GHz, and 2 GB of DDR3-1066 system memory to drive the internals. Two Gigabit Ethernet network ports are standard, with no expansion capability for additional Network Interface Cards (NIC). Five SATA 3Gb/s drive bays offer single disk, JBOD, and RAID 0/1/5/6/10 configurations. The capability for hot spares is available with any of the disk configurations. Thecus employs a single 1 GB flash memory module to store firmware and applications on the N5550 motherboard. This Disk-On-Memory (DOM) acts like the system drive, yet it takes up very little space and uses almost no power. Benchmark Reviews has tested quite a few NAS products, ranging from the QNAP TS-119 NAS single-disk offering made for home users, to the Goliath QNAP TS-879U-RP 8-Bay NAS for the storage needs of large businesses. We've recently tested the NETGEAR ReadyNAS NV+ v2 NAS servers, which falls in the middle between those two extremes. Let's see how this 5-bay device compares to its competitors.
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Comments
1. deduplication
2. end-to-end check sum error correction (CERN has stated officially, ZFS is the only reliable solution to protect data from bit rot)
3. and other ZFS features
also whats with 2gb minimum ram. they act as if ram is expensive, it's not. these days ram is sickeningly cheap because the companies producing them were not long ago fined for price fixing. Makes me wonder whether NAS companies are purposely price fixing to over charge for devices with little ram to squeeze as much more profit margin ....
People are starting to get fed up and moving onto DIY NAS solutions and which is cheaper, and has ZFS.
#forum.thecus.com/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=4440
None of them ever had a problem after upgrading the memory.
This one DOES & for a very specific problem that Thecus CAN'T SOLVE & MIGHT NEVER BE SOLVED.
See the forum for more details...
FOR NOW JUST KEEP AWAY FROM THIS UNIT.
to SMB, NFS -- much better latency, better security
since it's a UDP (not IP) protocol (confined to the
local network).
They have the lowest level of support i have ever seen.
If you plan to buy NAS to put non important files = you can go.
If you plan to buy it for your company to store file, i will not let go ... as you could loose your job LoL
They do the same for 4100 model , low memory = unstable , web manager slow , and Raid destruction ( no hardware raid controller LoL ).
Look over my post in the official forum, and you will understand why Thecus is good on paper , in real use this is nightmare !
You are warned !
You have been warned... again!
With ATTO i can have the same results as you have, BUT :
in real life, everybody is using samba shares under windows.
what about the only 55-65MB/s file transfers I get this way ?
Did you do this test ?
How can you show 111MB of read/write as it's impossible to achieve ?
I cannot get 111MB/s with any of the protocols available : smb, ftp, sftp, ssh, nfs, afp.
Please, tell me the truth about your tests ?
"During timed transfers of 1GB and 10GB files the N5550 recorded Read speeds of 111 MB/s and Write speeds above 118 MB/s. These are the RAID 5 results..."
Go back and read the NAS Testing Methodology page, where I explain how each test is run. The timed file transfers are done in Windows Explorer, of all things. Imagine that...Windows is faster than some dedicated file transfer protocols!
If you can get 120+ MB/s using ATTO, just like I did, then you already know that your unit is capable of that level of performance. So, look at all the extra elements that might be holding transfer rates back in your application(s). Also look at the host computers doing your transfers. I'm using a 10GB RAMDisk to eliminate any potential slowdowns due to the impact of storage devices on my test bed system. Transfer rates from a laptop HDD are going to be MUCH slower, for instance.
I got the same n5550 with 5x2TB HDD RAID5, and the same RAM disk drive, the difference is my Windows XP 64, and the fact I test with 802.3ad and 2xCAT5 cables on both sides.
I unfortunately am unable to reproduce your tests :
- which switch are you using ?
- which MTU is set on the PC ? on the NAS ? on the switch ?
- which strip size is set on your ext4 FS ?
- can you provide the result of "hdparm -tT /dev/md0" on the NAS ?
- did you "sync" the PC and the NAS after a transfer to eliminate the disk cache smoothing ? (I'm using a ported GNU version of sync.exe)
- did you monitor the RAM usage on the NAS during transfers ? I can get a 2GB peak during heavy load...
None of the time I did achieved a 110MB/s transfer with a single file, the max I get is 82MB/s with 2 files at a time from PC to NAS.
On normal conditions, I get 50-65MB/s max, mostly the same as on the n5500.
Thanks anyway for your time :-)
"...We are continuing our NAS testing with the exclusive use of Windows 7 as the testing platform for the host system. The performance differences between Win7 and XP are huge, as we documented in our QNAP TS-259 Pro review. The adoption rate for Win 7 has been very high, and Benchmark Reviews has been using Win 7 in all of our other testing for some time now. It was definitely time to make the jump for NAS products. ..." Here's the link:
benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=517&Itemid=70&limit=1&limitstart=10
Win7 beats XP by a mile in these scenarios, you should try it. None of the other factors you mention will make as big a difference as using Win7 on the PC side.
But since I invested in a L2 switch + 2 x cables between PC NAS I'm not throwing them away :-)
For the real load balancing one, one have to select balance-SLB + round robin, but it's charging the network for nothing since the packets are not ordered and the final bandwidth is not what I expected :-(
Well with this network configuration, I can have at best 90MB/s but only with 3 file transfers at a time, which is not I wanted.
I want as you have, a 110MB/s bandwidth with a single file transfer.
Surely this would be a cost effective way of increasing data transfer between computer and dedicated external storage. (And yes, I know this is not a NAS at this point, but I need a solution to replace a single external Harddrive for a laptop, and USB is a far simpler & cheaper setup than a network connection.)
Are there any vendors that are offering this in the SOHO market?
SATA III has a very minor impact on HDD performance, in my experience. It's only when you get to the third generation of SSDs, that SATA III was really needed.
Laptop does have eSATA (1 x eSATA/USB 2.0 combo), but manufacturer doesn't give away how fast the eSATA is going to run :-(
I'm not sure if I'm interpreting the N5550 spec correctly, but the eSATA spec seems to be imply that I would use if for adding an external disk to the device. I want to be able to use the NAS as eSATA storage for a computer/laptop.
If anyone has tried this with other NAS devices, I'd be very interested to know how transfer rates compare between eSATA and GB LAN (as the LAN connection should no longer be the bottleneck.)
Also, if vendors are monitoring this thread... Would be great if you are not then could publish your noise spec. Pretty important if the device isn't sitting in a rack, and next to or on somebody's desk.
It only supports one drive, though.
The drive enclosures that have just USB 3.0 and eSATA interfaces tend to be a whole lot cheaper than a full-blown NAS solution. There are dozens of them at Newegg, like this one:
newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1DS0CD0624
eSATA itself is a pretty quick interface.
The N5550 can't be a USB target - it can be used only as USB host.
Thecus has the N5200 family which is a bit "older" and I remember one of it's products can do it.
Take a look at their site.
Yaron.
As others have mentioned, Thecus did a major architecture update on their product line a few years ago. I can't find any instances of Client mode USB in their current offerings.
To edit the menu.lst file to remove the MEM=4G parameter
Via telnet/ssh (or console) :
# mount /dev/sdaaa1 /boot
# vi /boot/boot/grub/menu.lst