The provocatively named N5200XXX is one of a range of new NAS appliances from Thecus and claims to be extreme in every way. It hits the spot when it comes to price and in this review Dave Mitchell finds out whether it’s on target for performance and features as well.
Thecus has been busy upgrading its higher-end rack mounted NAS appliances, but with the launch of the XXX family the company finally turns its attention to its desktop products. The five-bay N5200XXX brings some much needed improvements to its predecessor, the N5200Pro.
Thecus catches up with vendors such as QNap, Synology and Netgear as the N5200XXX now has a 1.8GHz Atom D525 processor partnered with 1GB of DDR3 memory. Other physical changes aren’t as significant – the USB port count increased from three to five.
However, unlike theQNap TS-559 Pro II, none of these are of the USB3 variety. Another point to consider is that although the N5200XXX can handle 3TB SATA drives, it doesn’t support new SATA3 models whereas the TS-559 Pro II does.
The front panel hasn’t changed at all with a backlit LCD display providing system, network and disk status information and a keypad below allowing you to carry out basic configuration. Chassis cooling is handled by a large fan at the rear and we found that although noise levels are low, it’s not totally silent. In a busy office environment the appliance won’t be heard, but in a quiet room it will be noticeable.
The ports on the rear of the Thecus N5200XXX.
The review system was supplied to us by Origin Storage and came with five 1TB WD GreenPower SATA2 hard disks. Costing £648 ex VAT, this is superb value. A diskless model costs just £456 whilst a 15TB version costs £1,268.
Installation is swift as Thecus’ Setup Wizard locates the appliance and provides quick access to the main web interface. The interface isn’t quite as slick as QNap’s or Synology’s, but is still very easy to use.
There’s a good choice of RAID arrays with support for JBODs, mirrors, stripes, RAID 5 or dual-disk redundant RAID 6. For testing we created a five-disk RAID 5 array which took around six hours to build. However, after the initial formatting process, the array was made available for use after about twenty minutes.
The provocatively named N5200XXX is one of a range of new NAS appliances from Thecus and claims to be extreme in every way. It hits the spot when it comes to price and in this review Dave Mitchell finds out whether it’s on target for performance and features as well.
The appliance supports iSCSI targets but prior to RAID array creation, you must decide how much space you want to keep aside for these. Target creation is simple and iSCSI thin provisioning is supported so you can create targets that only use a small amount of space on the appliance but appear much larger to the host. As more data is stored on the target, the appliance dynamically allocates extra space to it.
IP SAN support extends to thinly provisioned iSCSI targets for better storage usage.
For workstation backup Thecus includes a single-user copy of Acronis True Image Personal which does not support Windows Server. It takes manual backups of files and folders or entire drives as images to the appliance and can create a bootable disaster recovery disk. However, this is a heavily stripped down version so if you want job scheduling, disk cloning, incremental backups and more you must upgrade.
Other backup options include support for Rsync where the appliance acts as a target for other appliances. A free add-on module allows it to replicate to other targets and another enables scheduled backups to locally connected USB and eSATA devices. The appliance’s operating system is also protected by Thecus’ dual-DOMs. The second DOM automatically maintains a backup copy which is called upon if the primary one fails and you can schedule regular backups too.
Many vendors are adding cloud-based services to their appliances but Thecus isn’t one of them. So far, the best example we’ve seen of this feature is QNap’s MyCloudNAS service which allows you to use the appliance to provide your own secure cloud backup, multimedia and file sharing services to remote workers.
The N5200XXX delivered respectable results in our performance tests. Using a Broadberry dual Opteron 4162-equipped rack server running Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit, drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip returned read and write speeds of 89MB/s and 86MB/s. Our 17.4GB collection of 10,500 files was also handled well with this folder copied to the appliance at a rate of 60MB/s.
The provocatively named N5200XXX is one of a range of new NAS appliances from Thecus and claims to be extreme in every way. It hits the spot when it comes to price and in this review Dave Mitchell finds out whether it’s on target for performance and features as well.
The FileZilla FTP client reported averages of 99MB/s and 92MB/s for downloads and uploads. IP SAN performance is also good with the Iometer utility reporting a top raw read speed over Gigabit of 109MB/s for a 75GB target.
The appliance’s capabilities can be upgraded with a good range of freely available software modules.
The appliance’s capabilities can be upgraded with a good range of freely available software modules. The IP camera module supports up to five cameras and provides basic surveillance features. However, it’s not as good as the equivalent features on QNap or Synology appliances as you can’t view live feeds or enable motion detection and it can only take scheduled snapshots at intervals of between one and sixty seconds.
The download station module can be used to retrieve remote files via BitTorrent, HTTP, FTP or eMule and home users will like the new Piczza module which provides a handy remote web photo server for organising galleries, sharing pictures and adding Google Maps links to show where they were taken.
The N5200XXX delivers plenty of NAS and IP SAN storage features along with some serious performance improvements over its predecessor. It’s very good value although if you can afford it, QNap’s TS-559 Pro II is superior as it offers far more features, supports the latest SATA3 hard disks and is slightly faster.
