Thecus N5550 5-bay SMB/SOHO NAS Server Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] With the flooding that occurred in Thailand last fall, many who were planning on putting together a NAS had their plans side-swiped. Who wants to spend $500 or so on a quality NAS and then $1,000 for 8TB of storage? Not me. Fortunately, prices have steadily come down over the past year, and while we're not quite at pre-flood pricing, we do seem to have settled. Last fall, a WD Green 2TB could have been snatched for about $80 with a good sale, but today, you can expect to fork over about $110. That means that for a typical 4-drive setup using 2TB drives today, you can score 8TB for about $440 - much improved over the $800+ that the same density would have cost 10 months ago. To help usher in the fact that people can actually afford hard drives again, Thecus has brought to market a follow-up to its popular 5-bay offering, the N5500. The N5550 (note the third 5) brings a faster CPU, more RAM, USB 3.0 and a general fine-tuning of things. It also sports Thecus' latest "OS", dubbed ThecusOS 5.0. Users of one or two-year-old Thecus NAS products will notice similarities, so the bulk of what's new is features that you've either been waiting for or just happen to stumble-upon. Thecus considers the N5550 to be an 'enterprise' product because it includes a fifth drive bay, whereas all of its official SOHO/SMB products include only four. But - most enterprises are going to want more than 5 bays, so more accurately; it's an SMB/SOHO product based on that and pricing. For business environments, the fifth bay will commonly be used as a spare, automatically introduced to the RAID in the event of a drive death, while for SOHO, users may consider using higher RAID levels that take advantage of all five drives. My personal usage scenario is 4 drives in RAID5 for content and backup, and the other for torrents and other randomness. As seen in the photo above, the N5550 isn't quite as attractive as the 4-bay N4200 series, with all of its OLED screen goodness, but it's suitable enough. For a couple of reasons, Thecus stows most of the buttons behind the door, such as the power and reset. Some might find this clunky, but it does prevent accidentally turning the device off, as a single hit of the power will initiate the shutdown process. Before we take a tour of the NAS, let's first take a look at what it brings to the table with its hardware and software. Thecus N5550 'Enterprise' 5-bay NAS - Hardware Processor Intel Atom D2700 (Dual-core, 1MB L2, 2.13GHz) Memory 2GB DDR3 Ethernet Intel 82574L Gigabit x 2 (10/100/1000 BASE-TX Auto MDI/MDI-X) RAID Controller Silicon Image SiI 3132 SATA 3Gbit/s Connectivity NEC-backed USB 3.0 Port Intel-backed USB 2.0 Port x 4 Et cetera LCM Display w/ 4 Buttons (Up, Down, Enter, Esc) 1GB SATA Disk-on-Module VGA and HDMI Output Microphone, Line input and Audio out jacks 200W Power Supply For SMB/enterprise use, performance is imperative, and for that reason Thecus has equipped the N5550 with one of the beefiest Atom processors around and doubled-up on the memory. This will not only keep the NAS running at top performance all the time, it'll drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to rebuild a RAID array. The N5550 includes dual LAN ports, one WAN and one LAN, which can be joined together for things like load balancing or failovers. One of the best additions over the N5500 is USB 3.0, although it's a shame there's only one port made available. HDMI and VGA outputs are included for those who may want to hook up a keyboard and mouse to the NAS and use it directly. There's also an unofficial XBMC module available in case you want to go the full-blown media center route. Many other third-party modules can be found on the official Thecus forums. Thecus N5550 'Enterprise' 5-bay NAS - Software RAID Capabilities JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 & 10 Auto-rebuild Hot-swap Hot Spare 256-bit AES Encryption Disk Roaming (NAS to Similar NAS) SMART Support Volume Capabilities Multiple RAID ext3, ext4 & XFS Network Fixed IP or Dynamic IP (IPv4) TCP/IP and AppleTalk Transport Protocols SMB/CIFS, HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, NFS and AFP File Protocols Link Aggregation for Load Balance, Failover, 802.3ad, Balance-XOR/TLB/ALB Data Backup Acronis True Image (Windows / Boot) Thecus Backup Utility (Windows / Mac OS X) The N5550 supports the regular gamut of RAID levels, but for some reason only ext3/4 and XFS file systems. Normally this wouldn't strike me too odd, but many of Thecus' previous NASes supported ZFS also, which is the route I would personally take if I had the option. It could be that ZFS is taking far too long to become 'finalized' that Thecus had simply decided against supporting it, but it still seems like an odd omission nonetheless. In addition to the NAS being able to hot-swap drives, it's also able to designate a drive as a "spare", used only if one of the other drives in your RAID happens to drop off. Thecus also touts disk roaming support here, so if in the future your N5550 gives up the ghost, you'll be able to migrate your drives over to another N5550 without the risk (I use the term loosely) of losing your data. A potential downside is that the N5550 does not support IPv6, and I'm not quite sure that's something a third-party module could even fix. Thecus might in the future, however, as it requires no hardware upgrade, but given the slow roll-out of the latest Internet protocol, the company must not see it as being a very important feature. In truth, it probably isn't, but if you're behind an ISP that does offer IPv6, the option would be nice to have. Like most NASes, this one runs on a variant of Linux; Red Hat to be exact. Linux version 2.6.38 (root@FC12-27) (gcc version 4.4.3 20100127 (Red Hat 4.4.3-4) (GCC) ) #1 SMP Thu Aug 23 20:20:11 CST 2012 On a desktop, a 2.6.38 kernel would seem horribly out-of-date (it was released spring 2011), but for a server / NAS where stability matters, it's actually quite modern. While Red Hat acts as a base, this is actually a very scaled-down version of Linux, so normal Red Hat commands, such as "yum", are not going to work. Any software you want to install needs to be handled through the NAS admin itself, which means it needs to be in module form. Please note that our information tables above are grossly minimal compared to the official ones, so if you want to know everything that this NAS is capable of, I'd highly recommend looking at the official product page. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=A Tour of the Thecus N5550: Hardware][Top Ad] The frame of Thecus' N5550 is pretty modest at 9.05 x 7.48 x 9.45", but it's actually fairly heavy at 16lbs. Add 5 normal hard drives to that and it'll become at least 23lbs. That, along with its heavy-duty frame, instills confidence that a simple nudge isn't going to hurt the NAS too much, and tripping over it should do little (I think of that latter example for no particular reason...) To help get a feeling for the size of the N5550, you can compare how an Xbox 360 controller and standard DVD case compare in the shot below. While the the chassis itself is as solid as I could expect it to be, I do wonder about the door. It's not likely that you'll be opening this door often, but a swinging door means there's a chance someone can run into it when not paying attention - the same risk exists with computer chassis that also have doors. I much prefer the styling of the N4200, but this might be personal taste. On the topic of the N4200, let's talk about LCDs. The N4200 has two (OLED), one on the side that displays static colors and another one, monochrome, at the top. Overall, these both look quite nice, and as such, I expected to see something similar on this beefier N5550. But that's not the case. Instead, the LCD is at the bottom, is very blue, and really doesn't represent the product as much as I think it should. When a smaller unit gets far cooler displays, it makes you wonder why Thecus decided to stick with the same display the N5500 shipped with. As a side note, this display does exist for a reason. It allows you to peruse various bits of information if no PC is turned on, such as the status of your RAID rebuilding. Overall, I found this clunky to use, and when I couldn't find much of an explanation in the manual, I just left it. Generally speaking, this is going to be primarily useful to watch for status updates if the need arises. Once your NAS is setup the way you like, the screen will likely never have to be referred to unless a drive dies. Sadly, it cannot be turned off. On each side of the N5550 are many holes for air circulation, however at any given time during testing, both sides were barely warm. Most of the heat gets concentrated to the back, which we'll tackle next. For the system, Thecus employs an 80mm exhaust fan at the back, while the 200W PSU has its own little fan at the bottom. Given their size, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect them to be loud, but even during use I'd have to get quite close to the NAS to be able to hear it. My desktop PC dwarfs the noise entirely, so I've never noticed it even running. If you try to keep room noise as quiet as possible, you can expect to hear little more than a mild hum out of this. As mentioned before, this NAS includes dual LAN ports, audio and video out and four USB ports. Again, it would have been nice if at least one of these USB ports were 3.0 enabled, especially since all motherboards I've ever come across have featured two 3.0 ports per chipset at the very least. At the front and with the door open, we unveil the five drive carriers, status LEDs and the power and reset buttons. These drive carriers have become popular within Thecus' line of NAS products, and short of being able to secure a drive without drive screws, I couldn't imagine how they'd get any better. A closer look at the status LEDs: Removing the N5550's chassis is pretty simple. After three thumbscrews at the back are disconnected from the chassis (the screws themselves do not come off...

Thecus N5550 5-bay SMB/SOHO NAS Server Review

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Rob Williams