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

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.

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: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...

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.

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.