3.5 Terabyte NAS Reviewed

Steve Kerrison writes "Thecus' new N5200 NAS can hold five SATA drives, which with currently available drives means up to 3.5TB (or 2.75TB in RAID-5) of storage before formatting. From the review: '£600. That's roughly what this will set you back, minus hard drives. Add in five 750GB drives and you'll be forking out a number closer to two thousand. However, act a bit more modestly and you can still have a terabyte (even in RAID-5) for under a grand.'"

Comments

Build one instead?

[JeffElkins]

I need a good NAS to hold a video collection. I wonder though if I'd be better off to build one instead. Cheap headless linux box with 5 bays would work, yes?

Re:Build one instead?

[unts]

Hi there,

The reviewer, in person, here. Yes, you certianly could build a cheaper solution and whack Linux on it (the N5200 uses Linux too, incidentally). Of course, it depends on what features you long, how much you like fiddling, and what sort of case you fancy building it into.

Indeed, this thing isn't for everyone, but doesn't it look lovely?

Re:Build one instead?

[Kjella]

For your average video collection (unless you're a serious home video guy who need real backup) I suggest skipping RAID altogether (except maybe RAID 1 on boot or whatever). Since any disk tends to fill to capacity, I've figured I'd rather have more and afford to lose some than not having space to store them at all. Plain Linux server, if price sweetspot is enough (300-320GB at the moment) drop in 4-6 of those (depending on mobo chipset) and you have 1.2-1.8TB of storage. If that's not enough, start dropping in 750s (they're actually better value than most 500GB disks). I run a setup like that but with older disks (2x160+120+100 = 540).

Re:Build one instead?

[Randolpho]

I need a good NAS to hold a video collection.

Don't let the MPAA hear you say that.

Er.... see you write that.

Er..Yeah.

Re:Build one instead?

[ozmanjusri]

I wonder though if I'd be better off to build one instead.

I've just done that. I put together a Sempron 2800 powered rig with 4 Western Digital WD5000YS SATA RAID drives for AU$2,300. I'm using ClarkConnect for the OS, and running the drives in a RAID 5 array, which gives about 1.5TB of usable space. The box runs headless, and is hidden away in a cupboard in my office.

Re:Build one instead?

[houghi]

If you want a movie, server, look here: http://www.kaleidescape.com/products/server.html
5.5 terabytes and you can even buy movies pre-loaded. Yes, you can add additional servers.

Re:Build one instead?

[legallyillegal]

i haven't heard a single case of MPAA vs. Random IP for the download of "Anal Bunnies 15" and such...

Re:Build one instead?

[Storklerk]

Yeah the N5200 does use linux. But I did not find any clear hint to this on the Thecus website.

Also I'm missing any documentation of how to upgrade the firmware to your own linux system.

If you want the source of their linux look here:
ftp://ftp.gpl-devices.org/pub/vendors/Thecus/

They tried to hide the linux, but without success:
http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/2006/02/24/

So until they openly say they are using linux and offer a way to upgrade the software on the system I will NOT buy one of these.

I did think about getting one of these. It has really nice features and if I could put my own linux system on one of the hard disk I could use it also as a dsl router and proxy (squid).

Anyone knows of a similar device with an upgradeble linux?

Re:Build one instead?

[Karzz1]

I built a 2Tb storage device w/another 250Gb for the OS a couple years ago as a backup solution for ~30 colo servers. I used a Tyan dual Xeon motherboard (there is a lot of compressing taking place on this machine), A 3Ware hardware RAID card, and a Chenbro 3u rackmount case with 12 SATA hot-swap bays and a single internal bay. I put 13 250Gb drives in it (2x250Gb software mirrored for OS, 10xRAID5 = 2Tb storage and 1 hot spare).

At the time the cost was ~$4000 while commercial solutions were closer to ~$8,000. I used CentOS 3 as the OS (4 was still in beta) and had to use the centosplus unsupported kernel in order to use reiser on the 2Tb array -- ext3 didn't work for some reason that I don't recall. The 3Ware card showed up with stock kernel modules as a SCSI controller.

I assume someone could build a similar system for about the same cost with much more disk space now. Also, if cost is a factor, the hardware RAID card (~$800) could be dropped in favor of software RAID and a single processor mobo could be used. I really** like the Chenbro case though and for the extra cost it leaves a lot of room for expansion if you were to start with only 5 drives and wanted to expand later.

Re:Build one instead?

[TCM]

Why is everyone always using 4 drives or 8 drives with RAID5? Considering most writes consist of 2^n bytes, you always need 2^n+1 drives in order to not waste any speed, i.e. 3, 5 or 9 drives.

I am using a software RAID5 and the difference between optimal and non-optimal is 71MB/s vs. 8MB/s writes! Hardware controllers could overcome some of this with their buffer memory, but I still think you should be using the optimal number of drives there.

Re:Build one instead?

[TCM]

I could only find this from the developer of NetBSD's software RAID implementation called RAIDframe http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2002/04 /19/0011.html:

The 'problem' with 4 disks is that you have (effectively) 3 data disks.
Since most times you're doing a 'power-of-two' write (e.g. 16K or 32K),
it's impossible to divide that power-of-two data by 3 and have a nice
full-stripe write. That leaves you with doing partial writes all the
time, and those are the ones that kill RAID 5 write performance.

In my case (NetBSD FFS) most writes are indeed 64K since I'm using a filesystem with a 64K block size. A whole stripe on my RAID is 64K as well (with 4 "data" components+1 parity component and 16K stripe size each), so a 64K write from the OS translates perfectly to 5*16K writes to the disk. This gives me over 107MB/s read speed and 71MB/s write speed from/to the raw device.

During testing I made a fatal error where, although the filesystem blocksize and stripe size matched, I had mistakenly offset the partition on the RAID by a number of blocks that was not a whole stripe. What then happened was that each 64K write didn't translate to 5*16K writes, but instead to 2* 4*16K reads (since each stripe is 64K and the 64K write from the OS overlapped 2 stripes partially), then parity recalculation of 128K data and then 2* 5*16K writes. This dropped the write speed to the mentioned 8MB/s.

I think the problem is equally bad if you try to write 2^n bytes of data to a prime number of data disks (3 or 5).

If you do it right, RAID5 write speed doesn't suck, not even with software RAID.

Re:Build one instead?

[zuzulo]

Another thing to remember when building high density storage appliances at the moment is that the MTBF for >=750 GB drives that use the new perpendicular recording tech (multiple layers of data - 2 at the moment - stored at each point) is actually higher than that for standard drives. That is, the new larger drives that use this tech are actually more reliable than smaller drives using the old tech. Seagate is the only drive manufacturer actually using perpendicular recording tech for retail drives, although this should be changing in the near future as more devices from other manufacturers make it into the retail chain.

I am not affiliated with Seagate or any other HDD manufacturer.

Conversion for Americans

[cynicalmoose]

For those of you who don't know how much a pound is worth:

£600 = $1100
£2000 = $3700

(Yes, the pound is one of the heaviest currencies in the world - in that one GBP is worth more than one unit of other currencies)

Re:Conversion for Americans

[daBass]

one GBP is worth more than one unit of other currencies

There are some exceptions; probably amongst others, the currencies of Bahrain, Kuwait, Cyprus, Malta and Oman are all worth more in units than GBP.

Build it myself

[hak_addictk]

I think I would much rather build a NAS instead of paying this much for one. Also I think it could be fun to build

Under A Grand?

[kneppercr]

A thousand dollars (pounds actually but it is too early to convert stuff) is a ridiculus price to pay for a terabyte of space. I just got an external 500 gig from newegg. Price? 230 real dollars. Yeah its USB, but you know what? I paid about 50 cents for a gig. THATS a good deal.

Buffalo Terastation Pro

[Bushcat]

I have a couple of the Buffalo Terastation Pros (name depends on market). They seem to be a no-brainer at their pricing point if one doesn't get the largest-capacity model. Reason for two: one can do encrypted backups to the second, so my stuff is reasonably backed up and maybe secure. The things are almost silent in use, which is a way bigger factor then I ever thought it would be. Downside is the units don't support NFS out of the box, so they're just a tad too slow to stream video from. (Unless the problem is the Tvix5000U, a Korean product which is a great hardware design totally stuffed by abysmal software.)((As was it predecessor))(((And its portable equivalent)))((((Bugger, I spot a purchasing trend here I should have fixed))))

Re:Under A Grand?

[eebra82]

A hot tip is to check out google's own currency conversion. Simply type in something like "500 usd in gbp" (without the quotes) and you will get the result, looking like this:

500 U.S. dollars = 271.783443 British pounds

Works the same way for converting Celcius to Kelvin, metrics to other systems and so forth. Calculator included!

OS

[Kadin2048]

It would seem to me that one of the strengths of the COTS solutions are that they have fairly slick integrated interfaces for managing access.

If you roll your own, you might well have to set up Samba/CIFS/Netatalk all separately, which could easily become a huge pain. If you want a new share, you'd have to add it manually to all three, and deal with their varying authentication schemes.

I did some Googling around for OSes specifically designed for roll-your-own NAS boxes (which it seems must exist), and came up with some stuff. One of the neatest projects looks like it has died, which is sad: Darma NAS OS. It seemed to be Linux-based and had a Java web-based management GUI, used the usual SMB/NFS/AppleShare, and supported ACLs and some other neat management stuff.

I'm curious what people who've gone the DIY route are using to ease the management hassle that I could easily see a SAN becoming if it's OS is just straight Linux.

A custom built alternative

[nxtw]

(All prices approximate.)

This will support 4 drives over SATA, or 7 if you use all of the IDE channels:
$105 4U case and 400w power supply
$165 915G Socket 479 Motherboard w/ 4 SATA, 2 IDE, and gigabit ethernet.
$71 Celeron M 370 (Dothan) CPU
$25 DDR2 memory (256MB)
$25 CompactFlash OS drive (1GB)
$15 IDE to Compact Flash adapter
$0-25 Linux OS -- there are specialized NAS distributions available commercially for those that afraid of setting things up themselves
= $406-$431

Which beats this device's $670 lowest price found on Froogle.

Additions:
$20 4x SATA I
$60 4x SATA II
$50-100 Replacement power supply
+$60 1GB DDR2
+$150 Pentium M CPU

Sure, the Celeron M will use more power than a Celeron M ULV, and the included power supply may be inadequate for configurations with large drives (but that's more drives than the article's product supports). And this device doesn't have the USB device capaibility, either. But you've got the freedom to do things how you like.

Re:A custom built alternative

[Saeger]

Just to see how reasonably low I could go, I spec'd out an even cheaper do-it-yourself Micro-ATX software raid5 box:

$34-44 - MicroATX MINI-tower case w/ 300-400W PSU, 4x int 3.5" bays + 1-2x ext 3.5" (or 5.25" bays w/ brackets)
$79 - MicroATX Asus Socket 939 MB w/ 4x SATA2, 2x PATA, pci-e, gigabit, integrated vid&audio
$92 - AMD Athlon64 3000+ (cheapest socket 939 cpu)
$22-$40 - 256MB DDR400 (or $40 for 512)
$25 - 1GB CompactFlash (80X)
$12 - IDE-CF Adapter
$14 - 1x SATA PCI-e controller (1 + 4 onboard = 5x sata and no PATA crap); micro-atx MBs with more than 4x sata aren't common. Would like 6x for a hotspare option.
$0 - FreeNAS, or roll your own.
= $278 - $306

Add 5X Seagate 320GB SATA2 drives @ $100 each, which comes to $773 total for a 1,280GB RAID5 NAS box. Not too shabby. Could get the drives even cheaper than $0.31/GB by waiting for a better with-rebate-hassle deal.

Biggest downsides to this kinda of thing:
1) setup time for h/w and s/w
2) no easy hotswap bays with blinken LEDs to tell you "THIS DRIVE IS DEAD/DYING; REPLACE ME!", so you have to rely on mdadm alert emails and SMART monitoring, then crack the case open and KNOW the sata order so you replace the RIGHT sdX drive.
3) ugly and bigger than it needs to be

When some company comes along and sells a 5-6 drive raid5 box like this for $150-$250 (instead of triple that) I bet it'll be a HUGE hit.

Re:Under A Grand?

[rtaylor]

I just got an external 500 gig from newegg. Price? 230 real dollars.
$230 * 4 (redundancy to prevent data loss) = ~$1000 for 1TB.

If you don't mind losing your data then this product is not for you. We can also ignore the performance difference between 4 individual USB drives and a single network attached device.

NASLite

[Anonymous Coward]

NASLite from http://www.serverelements.com/ allows you to use quite ancient hardware (eg Pentium 1 or 2) and get a 4 (or even 8 with the latest version) hard drive NAS up and running with SMB, NFS, FTP and HTTP access. Took me about 10 mins (not including formatting), and only had to buy the hard drives since people virtually throw away machines that this can run on! Worth every cent of it's modest fee IMHO. (I have no affiliation to NASlite)

NAS without RAID5?

[poptones]

No way would I use a machine like that without a RAID5 setup. I've lost countless hours (and access to music I no longer have, since the CDs were lost in a move or just quit playing). Whatever you spend on discs, going from 4-5 only adds 20% in cost, which even at $400 is pretty damn cheap compared to the work a TB or two of storage represents.

Old machines with ATX type motherboards and such are far too cheap to justify shelling out $700 or more for a "dedicated" type solution. Get an old machine with a P2B-F motherboard and a decent PII cpu, throw away the old power supply and put in a shinty new $70 or so power supply, plug in a controller card if you wanna use SATA drives, and off you go - essentially for the price of the drives you want to put in it.

No pics?

[fiendy]

I guess with all the ads crammed on to the page, they don't have room for a pic of the actual piece of hardware they are reviewing.

But will it work with Vista?

[Digital Pizza]

I didn't see mention of what internal software was used, but a lot of NAS devices use Samba and won't work properly with Vista. Check out this link.

That's the problem with NAS devices; Microsoft loves to change its network protocols with each new version of Windows, breaking countless NAS devices that are past vendor support.

There are a number of NAS devices designed to work with Windows 2000 that don't work well with windows XP; the vendors won't provide updates and would rather you just chuck it and buy a new NAS device.