Network Attached Storage devices used to be the domain of Enterprise. However, over the last few years, companies have started to come out with more consumer oriented versions of these proucts. These dedicated storage solutions can now be easily be added into any users home network and provide a reliable means to backup the digital stuff that we accumulate. Today, we look at one of the most powerful consumer accessible NAS devices, manufactured by a company known as Thecus.
It’s All About RAID…
Thecus’s N5200B Pro excels in this category by offering a huge list of RAID options including RAID 0 through 10 (even JBOD) and Auto Rebuild, Hot Swappable, Hot Spare, Disk Roaming, RAID Level Migration and RAID Expansion. With support for up to five disks plus one additional eSATA disk for a total of six drives, you won’t soon run out of space, especially with support for up to 1TB drives.
It also features something called iSCSI, which essentially turns the N5200pro into a directly attached hard drive, but over the network. Although there are Enterprise level applications for this feature, I have yet to fathom a situation where regular users would find this particularly useful in day to day use. It is a feature that sets the N5200B Pro apart from the competition.
Techheads can head over to the Thecus website for more detailed specifications, but for the purpose of this review, we’ll be seeking answers in useability and overall NAS performance.
Other Useful Tricks…
The N5200B PRO has a brother that incorporates a router and a four port Gigabit switch right onboard called the N5200BR PRO. The “R” in the name of course standing for router. Since most small businesses or offices have routers and switches already installed, this feature seems rather redundant. The N5200B Pro that we’re reviewing today, instead, incorporates something far more useful which is the inclusion of two Gigabit Ethernet Ports for fail over redundancy. Basically, when one port gives up the ghost, be it on the switch side or on the N5200B Pro itself, the other one should seemlessly take over. If that doesn’t float your boat, it can also do load balancing.
Other niceties include printer support for sharing out a USB printer and in installations where wires cannot be routed, the N5200B Pro can be made wireless using a supported USB WiFi adapter. The ports are also useful for communicating with a UPS. Speaking of USB, the N5200B Pro allows sharing of standard USB drives through the network. If there’s a new file to share to the minions, just plug in the USB drive and away and go. This should also work well with digital workflow when using cameras and camcorders, allowing you to have a backup of files on the NAS before destructive changes are made to original files.
You really can’t call this device dull as it continues with applications such as the ability to become a web server, IP Security Cam, or remote FTP. After hearing the laundry list of talents this device has, you almost start to forget that it costs around $818 – $838 on the street…hard drives not included.
What’s In The Box?
Inside the box, you’ll find your usual assortment accessories including a power cord, a USB Cable, a Gigabit Ethernet Cable, a Quick Start Guide and a more extenstive on CD user manual. A software CD is also included with some useful drive cloning software (DriveClone3) and the utility necessary to initialize and setup the N5200B PRO. Let’s move along and get better acquainted with the hardware itself…
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First Impressions
The N5200B Pro feels like a pretty solid piece of equipment, but has some areas that make it feel a little bit lesser than it should be.
For starters, the drive bays are made of a combination of plastic and stamped steel trays. Even fully locked up in N5200B Pro, they jiggle. As we’ll find out later, even with drives installed, they still jiggled. Although if you leave it alone and don’t jiggle them, they won’t bother you, but there is an opportunity to introduce some vibration dampening into the drive trays. There was none, not even a thin layer of rubber to keep things vibration free. I also found it quite disturbing to see that the lock mechnisms could possibly be defeated by hand, potentially making the bays inaccessible to both you and the vandal.
On the subject of security, because devices like these typically contain important files, the fact that you could open the thing up without a key from behind is rather frightening. There was no mechanism in which you could throw a padlock on it and the screws can be removed with just a simple philips head screwdriver. There isn’t even a laptop lock port so you could at least keep it attached to something.
Security issues aside, the N5200B Pro does have a nice LCD display that gives you the 411 on drive status and other useful information. Buttons underneath allow you to cycle through the information. A main power and rest switch sit to the left of the display, just like a regular PC, which isn’t too far from the truth, as we’ll find out.
The left side of the N5200B Pro is where you’ll find the operational status lights and a USB port for plugging in your USB thumb drive or camera. Also here, you’ll see the two Gigabit Ethernet activity lights for each port. When both are on, that means both ports are working. When one is on, you need to figure out why the second one isn’t working. The drive bays themselves also employ an LED system to indicate status.
Moving to the back, you’ll see the main cooling fan including two additional USB ports, eSATA port, USB port for direct connecting the NAS to a PC (yes, you can do that) and the two ethernet ports. The lone legacy serial port is for use with some UPS devices. The powersupply is at the base of the unit and adopts a very rack server like appearance. It also incorporates its own fan unit so that if the main fan fails, the system will still operate and can affect a proper shutdown. The main power switch is also attached to it.
As mentioned earlier, there is nothing keeping anyone from breaking into the back of this unit as there are no provisions for physical security measures like a padlock. So I guess it’s only logical that we investigate the guts of this device next.
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Taking a Peek Inside the Thecus N5200B Pro
Disassembling the N5200B Pro was disturbingly easy. I had the whole thing in pieces in seconds after getting the three screws backed out. They are thumbscrews no less, offering a tool-free entry. Here you can see the 120mm fan that keeps the unit cool under regular operation. I did like seeing that the fan itself was easily user replaceable and adds to its potential user serviceability.
A few more seconds later, I had the guts layed out on my table and as suspected, it is definitely more computer than appliance. The system relies on a DDR 512MB memory module and a Celeron ULV 1.5GHz processor to power itself. A small cooling fan is attached to the CPU. Based on the modularity of these two main hardware pieces, you can see the upgrade potential built into the N5200B Pro. I’m sure people have attempted upgrades to a 2GB module and a Pentium III M CPU already. The board also stores its operating system on a 128MB Flash Disk Module plugged into an IDE header. The second Gigabit Ethernet port rides on a daughter card above the standard PCB.
Based on my inspection of the innards, I was fairly pleased with the build quality of the inside of the device. With easily replaced parts due to its ease of disassembly, the N5200B Pro does have the propensity to be inexpensive to keep running as surplus parts should decrease in cost over time. This is a good thing as a device like this tends to stick around for the long haul.
Hardware Setup
Although you can start with just a couple drives and add drives later, we’re just going to skip that and just start the ball rolling with a set of FIVE Seagate ES.2 1TB 7200RPM SATA Drives courtesy of our good friends at Seagate Technology.
Before all the fun begins, you’ll need to get your drives nestled into their hot swap drive bays. We repeated this procedure five times because we had five drives.
Since you’ll never see them again once they are inserted, I wanted to point out the swiss cheesing in the base of the drive bays. This will help with a bit of the cooling rather than covering them up and letting the poor drives roast under pressure. You can see here that the mounting screws fix to the base of the drive to keep them in place. All that’s left is to plug in the power cord, connect one or both of the Gigabit Ethernet ports to your network and power it up.
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Software Setup
Unlike other NAS devices out on the market, the N5200B Pro requires a bit of initial setup before you can do anything with the disks. You’ll need to figure out how you want to set them up and then execute the setup using the web interface. Examples of different setups include the ability to run a straight RAID 5 array with a hot spare, or even two seperate RAID arrays (a RAID 0 and a RAID 1 for example) on the same machine, and of course, your iSCSI partitions. In a sense, it’s kind of a good thing that you need to manually figure out what to do before you do it, but for a lot of people that just want it to auto configure and do its thing like some competing products on the market, it can be a bit of a handful.
The only real piece of software you come across is the setup utility. This simple utility included on one of the setup disks allows you to find the NAS on your network and setup basic features to get you able to login to the web interface through your browser of choice. This is necessary especially if your network does not use the default IP address format that the N5200B Pro comes standard with. However, once you locate the N5200B Pro, you’ll be able to do basic setup to get the ball rolling. Then you never see this application again as all the other stuff is done through your browser.
Once you’ve got the setup done, you will be able to punch in the N5200B Pro’s IP and login to the device. From there, you will configure your services, RAID setup, permissions and other device settings including whether you want the dual Gigabit Ethernet ports to support fail over or load balancing. To keep things simple, we setup the N5200B Pro to use all five of our Seagate 1TB drives in a RAID 5 setup and allocated 5% to an ISCSI partition that we could mess around with. We also set the Gigabit ethernet ports to do fail over. From start to finish, it took roughly thirteen hours for this process to complete. The web interface isn’t the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, but it does do the job and is fairly snappy.
Although the process isn’t automatic in the sense that you can just insert a disk and have the device make use of it immediately, the number of drive configurations you can setup makes this device highly customizable. So in a sense, it’s good that it doesn’t take the drive and do what it wants with it. The downside is that you really need to know what you’re doing in advance: The web interface isn’t particularly helpful. I found most of my answers looking around the various Thecus support forums and picking through the manual. You sort of need to plan out how you want things to setup before actually doing it because if you take all the disks and make a RAID 5 array like we did, you can’t really go back easily without starting over again. That likely means another 13 hrs of waiting around.
With all the drives functioning properly in a RAID 5 array, we proceed to checking out the performance of this product.
System Setup
Again, we’d like to thank Seagate Technology for graciously providuing us with five of their enterprise level ES.2 Barracuda 1 TB hard drives for our enjoyment. All benchmarks were run on the following system:
- AMD Phenom 9900E 2.6GHz Quad Core CPU (Provided by AMD)
- Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP 790FX Motherboard (Provided by ASUS)
- CORSAIR XMS2 DHX 4GB DDR2-800 Memory Kit (Provided by CORSAIR)
- Sapphire ATOMIC HD3870 Video Card (Provided by Sapphire)
- Western Digital Velociraptor WD3000GLFS Hard Drive (Provided by Western Digital)
- HighSpeedPC Top Deck Tech Station (Provided by HighSpeedPC)
- ANTEC Quattro 1000 Watt Power Supply (Provided by ANTEC)
Noise and Power Consumption
Since a device like this would be turned on 24/7, we should be concerned about the noise levels and power consumption. After all, no one wants a noisy little box jacking up our utility bills in the office. Using a noise level meter, we were able to pin down noise levels of 50 dB from the front of the device. We took power consumption numbers of the N5200B Pro at idle and found that it consumed about 84 Watts. We simulated load by doing a file system check and found that this increased power consumption to around 98 Watts. The N5200B Pro does come with power management capabilities, allowing you to further reduce consumption to your needs.
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Performance
Using the built in ISCSI Initiator inside Windows Vista 64 bit, I mounted the 200GB ISCSI partition, formatted it, and was able to run a quick HD Tune Pro benchmark on it to see what kind of read performance we could get out of the N5200B Pro. The N5200B Pro was hooked up to our network using both ports to a Linksys SR2016 16 Port Gigabit switch and then back to our system through its Gigabit port. Here’s what we found out…
Compared to the Enhance Tech T4H CR, a desktop RAID system that we reviewed earlier in the year, running four disks in a similar RAID 5 configuration, we found that USB 2.0 was no match for iSCSI. From Firewire 400 to eSATA though, the Enhance Tech pulled ahead in transfer speeds, despite having higher access times. However, the T4H CR cannot be hooked up to a network as it is desktop only.
Real world drag and drop tests using a folder of mixed media (pictures, movies, documents, music) measuring 694MB dropped onto a test folder that I setup on the N5200B Pro in 21 seconds, for a write speed of around 33 MB/s. Taking the same folder and dropping it back on the desktop was completed in 19 seconds, for a read speed of roughly 36.5 MB/s, which is consistent with our iSCSI results.
Just for fun, we ran this same drag and drop test on our NetGear ReadyNAS NV that we’ve had in the office for ages as our backup solution and found that it took us 59 seconds to drop the file to a test folder on the unit, while it took us 20 seconds to pull the file back to our desktop. This works out to a 11.8 MB/s write speed vs the 33 MB/s of the N5200B Pro.
Another item that we thought worthy of a test was the failover protection using the second Gigabit port. I started that same file transfer above and while it was transferring, I yanked one of the cables and the N5200B Pro simply passed the job on to the other one. The transer continued with minimal impact to the data transfer.
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
Although I’m extremely impressed with the performance of the N5200B Pro by Thecus, I am reluctant to give this product a glowing recommendation. For starters, the steep learning curve in configuring this device, compared to most network attached storage devices on the market, makes it a bit more specialized towards small business and enterprise level applications. It’s literally got way too many features for the average user. However, if you’re the type that likes to tinker or if you’re an enthusiast of such devices, then this might be the thing to keep you entertained into the wee hours of the night.
This product has such potential to please both users groups by simply having two levels of useability. Providing the user with an easy setup option or an advanced option would go a long way to attracting users to this high performance product. For one group, it could just take any disk you insert and just expand to utilize it, while power users can setup and slice up the array as they please. Just pretty up the web interface and make it an easy option.
Overall, I give this product the nod in the performance category, but my initial concerns about physical security (can’t lock it up properly) and the somewhat user unfriendliness of the web based interface keep me from really embracing this product. I know that Thecus has been working on this in new products and I can’t wait to see what they come up with and if they can keep the high performance while incorporating that user friendliness.
Pros
- Excellent performance
- Modular design makes for an easy to service device
- Lots of setup options which are ideal for the power user
- Nice and bright LED display gives useful information at a glance
Cons
- Web interface is daunting for even experienced individuals
- Wobbly drive trays
- Sketch security makes this device easy to break into
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Thecus N5200B PRO Five-Bay NAS Server Photo Gallery
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