Thecus N5200 3.5TB NAS Appliance Reviewed

I am an IT professional and have worked with (i.e. purchased, configured, maintained) literally dozens of different RAID and fault-tolerant storage systems for almost 15 years.




At home I have about 200 GB of photos and video clips of my young kids that I consider “priceless” and was looking for a good, reasonably priced, fault-tolerant NAS solution for home use to safeguard my photos & videos. The N5200 looked like it was just the solution. Multiple RAID levels, JBOD, hot-swappable drive bays, etc. I was especially attracted by the drive “power management” feature, which claimed to spin-down drives when not in use, thereby saving power and extending drive lifetime.





LOSING ALL MY DATA





Within days after configuring a RAID6 array with 5x500GB Western Digital drives, I was alerted by the N5200’s audible alarm. It seemed that one of the (brand new) drives had “failed”. I was surprised but not concerned, since a RAID6 array can lose up to two drives without losing data. I thought that perhaps the “failed” drive had not been properly seated into its drive bay, so I removed it and re-inserted it. This was the first time the N5200 showed me its unreliable nature. I have no idea how or why, but the mere act of removing and re-inserting that one drive caused the entire array to fail. I lost all the data on the array. Fortunately, I still had copies of my data on other systems.





After recovering from my shock, I re-initialized the array with all 5 of the original drives – it turned out the drive wasn’t bad after all. After this, the N5200 appeared to be stable for awhile, but I discovered that the drive power-management feature didn’t work. The drives never did spin down, even with days and weeks of inactivity. When I contacted Thecus support about this, they told me that there was a bug in the firmware, and that I should download and install the latest. I did, and power-management never worked.





ERRATIC, UNPREDICTABLE, AND UNRELIABLE





A few months later, I was again alerted by the audible alarm. It seems that one of my drives had “failed” again. This time I pulled the drive, and replaced it with a new one (it was still under warranty by WD). When I put the new drive in and “added” it to the degraded array, suddenly another drive “failed”. This was too much of a coincidence. I then replaced that drive as well. When I added it back to the array, the N5200 began a period of “spontaneous rebuilding” for a couple of weeks. It would add the drives back in, and then the array would suddenly start rebuilding itself again for no reason. Drives would “fail”, fall out of the array, and I would be unable to get them added again (even after testing the drives on other systems), unless I re-initialized the whole array (i.e. wiped the data).





THECUS SUPPORT NOT HELPFUL





I tried to work with Thecus support for many weeks. It seemed like they didn’t believe me when I described what was happening. I then tried to get Thecus to replace the unit, which they would not do.


So now I am using those very same 500GB disk drives in separate external drive enclosures (no RAID), which I have plugged into a couple different computers in my house, and I just have scheduled batch jobs that RoboCopy my photos around to several different drives every day. It’s not a sexy solution, but at least I have fault tolerance that I can trust!





THE N5200 IS A “TOY” NAS DEVICE





While it has all kinds of nifty features, the N5200 is not a safe place to put your data. The bottom line is that I could not trust my precious photo library to this device. I could have happily done without most of its features, if only it were reliable and fault tolerant. Unfortunately, in this department the N5200 failed miserably.





IF YOU VALUE YOUR DATA, DON’T TRUST THIS DEVICE TO PROTECT IT.

Yes, it's fast. That's about the only thing it has going for it. I installed one for a client and it was a nightmare... the issues the poster above mentions just scratch the surface. If you are using only windows and Linux clients, if you don't care about access control, and if you simply want a basic network disk, it will work fine. But many of the additional features- access controls, snapshots, OS X support, etc... are badly broken.




Worse, Thecus support is basically non-existant... they were slow to respond to e-mail, and the phone support appears to be a single employee in California, who didn't even have an N5200 when I called for help with the numerous issues.





-R

Did you get an answer from Thecus?As I`m planning to buy this item,I would be interested to read about any reaction.

Thanks in advance,birge

Dear Thecus Support




I purchased your N5200 model after reading a positive review of it on Hexus.net. My requirements are as a home user, backing up my DVDs and storing HD content. I would also like to add that I'm a software engineer by profession, so have a good understanding of technical details and user interaction. I purchased the product for 805€ from nwkomp.de.





I would also like to make clear I will be posting this email on the relevant newsgroups and comments on reviews. I feel I owe it to other potential buyers. To be fair, I will also post any response from Thecus - so I hope it is a good response.





I received this item today (after a 2-week delay from the supplier), and I have to say I'm disappointed. I would appreciate a point by point response to the following:





1) Firstly, overall documentation is pretty bad - apart from basic grammatical and spelling errors, it's not actually very informative. As one example, out of many, the details regarding "user percentage" is very unclear.





2) Even the device itself, on the LCD, has spelling errors. It says 'formattin' instead of 'formatting', even though there are clearly several cells left on the display. Either someone noticed it and couldn't be bother to do anything about it, or simply didn't notice after, presumably, months of development. I am not sure which is worse. This single issue is not a great problem in itself, but I do think it indicates the quality of your products is less than great.





3) Here's a big qualm: Why does it take five hours to format 5 250Gb drives? Can this not be done in parallel? If it is done in parallel, that's even more shocking. This is supposedly in 'rebuild speed:high' mode - I shudder to think how long 'low' takes.





4) Here's the biggie that prompted this rant: Clicking 'remove' on the RAID page does exactly that. What it DOESN'T do is WARN you, or give you a second chance!!! That's it - BOOM, data gone. That sounds like a schoolboy error to me - one of the first rules of software interfaces is to protect the user. Fortunately, it IS what I wanted to do, but it could easily not be in the future, and I'd be VERY wary of even viewing that page, for fear of accidentally clicking the button, or pressing return with the button highlighted... Of course, its taking ANOTHER 5 hours to build the array - surely not... Thought I'd take the time to write this while it's chugging along.





5) The reason I chose to remove the RAID array was because there is NO WAY to change the percentages of Snaptshot and USB allocations. (By the way, to allow only specification by percentage is plain lazy. Why not absolute values? I think a lot of users would want a less that 1% amount dedicated to USB for instance, say enough for a 4gb card). Why can't you just have a special folder, which can vary in size like any other folder?





6) (This list is getting really quite long for a product I've not even finished setting up) The documentation clearly states that the red LEDs indicate a problem, and yet, from what I can gather from using the N5200, they are also red during formatting, except the top one, which is green. Explaining properly to the user what to expect during different states is again another basic error.





7) The web interface does not contain any context sensitive help! How easy would it be to put a little question mark icon, or something similar, that one could click to see what that particular item does?





8) The 'snapshot' item in the menu does nothing when I click on it (after I'd setup the RAID array the first time, and the system was reporting 'healthy')





9) Whomever wrote the content for the web interface does not appear to have had knowledge of the past tense in English. Again, not a great problem, but it's very irritating to see so many errors on a product I have spent so much on.





10) The 'status' column on the disk information page contains only the text 'OK?'. I click that to see nothing but 'N/A' for all the so-called SMART INFO.





11) Generally, the options and information all seems very limited. For a product of this expense I would expect to see far more information on the component disks, and generally spped and transfer amounts and rates.





12) The fan is really rather noisy. There is not need for that level of noise in such a small product. I know there will probably be some stock excuse, but to me in seems like poor engineering, considering the availabilty of quiet fans, and the fact that hard drives don't really need a great deal of cooling.





13) My main two reasons for purchasing this product, rather than building my own with a Linux distribution, is the small form factor of the case, and the plug and play aspect. In the first aspect, I am pleased - it's a reasonably compact unit, and is well presented. On the later though, I am really very disappointed, Sloppy documention, sloppy web interface, excruciatingly slow RAID setup, and just a general lack of confidence in keeping my data on the device, once I finally get it set up.





Yours disappointed








Marcos Scriven

It's great to see more of these devices popping up on the market but I think the price point continues to be an issue. Especially when I can by a low prices rig for hundreds of dollars and just dump several drives in it to provide similar functionality.

Michael Gannotti