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Post by Arctra on Apr 16, 2009 7:07:52 GMT 7
To any prospective Thecus N5200 buyers out there, you might be interested in the long term performance of the product.
I have had my N5200 for just over 2.5 years now and it's been turned on almost the entire time. The only time I turn it off is to move it which happens very rarely.
Originally I started with 3 Samsung HD501LJ 500GB hard drives, then migrated to 5 drives. The early days of Thecus firmware were less than impressive, which made the migration process painful, but I managed.
It wasn't long before my NAS was full though, so I replaced the 500GB HDD's with Western Digital WD10EACS-00ZJB0 1TB drives. I hot swapped the drives one at a time, letting the RAID5 array rebuild before replacing the next disk, then expanding the storage space to utilise the full 1TB capacity of each drive. That process could not have gone more smoothly in my opinion.
I just checked this morning, and my WD's have been running for 10,000 hours now, with only 10 restarts according to the INFO module. That's 10,000 painless hours of satisfied usage that makes me a BIG fan of the Thecus.
So in a nutshell I highly recommend the N5200 product. I see now that there is a 7 disk Thecus (7000 series) which is interesting, but I'm not sure it's the next step for me. I have been seriously debating a DIY NAS. For the past year or so I have been running a 6 disk RAID 5 array in my PC using the built-in Intel ICH9R chipset on my mobo, but I have to say the performance, even with a Q6600 quad core CPU, is disappointing.
I think the next step for me is to get a dedicated case with dual PSU's to power up to 20 HDD's, an Adaptec 51645 controller, and a Linux OS to build up a monster DIY NAS. I'd have to do the sums, but I reckon that'd be cheaper than getting an enterprise solution, or several Thecus boxes... unless Thecus bring out an even higher series? I seriously doubt that'll happen though as the trend seems to be towards 2 or 3 disk NAS's with bigger HDD's which are cheaper than the 5+ disk solutions.
Anyway, I thought you might find that interesting. Feel free to ask questions.
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flynn
Junior Member
Posts: 88
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Post by flynn on Apr 17, 2009 3:58:48 GMT 7
Thanks for the review.
Could you give us an idea of what firmwares you were on at which stages of this 2.5 year lifespan?
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Post by Arctra on Apr 26, 2009 5:44:16 GMT 7
*LOL* I pretty much upgraded firmware with every one of the 1.xx.xx releases, but then I got to the stage that the box worked, had too much data for me to feel comfortable upgrading, and I just didn't have the time anymore.
What's the old adage - if it ain't broke, don't fix it?
I'm now using 2.00.04 and have no trouble connecting to it with my Macbook (OS X Leopard), or any of my Windows boxes (XP, Vista Home Premium 32bit, and Vista Ultimate 64bit. I used to use Jumbo frames but my Airport Extreme seems to freeze with them so am no longer using them (which is a pity coz it made a difference IMO).
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Post by Arctra on Sept 26, 2009 12:11:36 GMT 7
Hi again guys. It's been a few months now and I thought I'd give you another update in case you were still on the fence. My N5200 BR (RouStore) is still running firmware 2.00.04 with my 5 Western Digital WD10EACS drives and has been running for 242 days continuously according to Uptime. I actually think it's been running longer than that with it's last reboot being that long ago. It's so d**n good and reliable that I actually forget it's even there even though I use it daily. My Macbook does its Time Machine backups to it every few hours, and the various machines on my network write data to it and pull data off it all the time, so it never really sleeps. The only reason I all of a sudden remembered it was because I got an email notification saying there's been a reallocated sector on one of my drives and the raid was operating in degraded more while it was running its checks. The rebuild took about 14 hours but all is well and had it not been for the email I wouldn't have known anything was wrong. Naturally the reallocated sector is a worry so I'll be replacing that drive shortly. 1.5TB drives seem to be the best bang for buck at the moment so I think I'll be replacing my current drives with 5 new Samsung 1.5TB's. I could do with the extra space, and will use the "old" drives as offline backups for my most critical data. I think I'll also upgrade to the version 3 firmware when it comes out of BETA. I'm very excited to see it offers ZFS as this was something I had on my wishlist! When I do the upgrade I think I'll be starting afresh as the filesystem and shares setup I originally needs some tweaking and that upgrade will be a good opportunity to do a cleanup. Extracts from my INFO Module if you're interested: System Info Firmware Version: 2.00.04 Product: n5200 Producer: THECUS CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 600MHz Uptime: 242 days 16:30 LoadAvg: 0.58 1.47 1.91 Fan 1 speed: 0 Fan 2 speed: 2579 Switch Board: Yes Filesystem Info: /raid/data Size 3757216552 KB Used 3598439584 KB Available 158776968 KB Percent used 96 % Network Interface Info: eth0 Link Status: RUNNING Speed: 1000Mb/s Duplex: Full Addr: 192.168.1.100 BroadCast: 192.168.1.255 NetMask: 255.255.255.0 TxBytes: 2949667017 bytes TxPackets: 1636751205 packets RxBytes: 2241208452 bytes RxPackets: 1036499022 packets RAID Info: /dev/md1 Level: raid5 State: clean Array Size: 3899199488 bytes Device Size: 974799872 bytes Chunk Size: 1024K Raid Devices: 5 Total Devices: 5 Active Devices: 5 Working Devices: 5 Failed Devices: 0 Spare Devices: 0 | Disk Info: | /dev/sda | /dev/sdb | /dev/sdc | /dev/sdd | /dev/sde | | Vendor: | WDC | WDC | WDC | WDC | WDC | | Model: | WD10EACS-00ZJB0 | WD10EACS-00ZJB0 | WD10EACS-00ZJB0 | WD10EACS-00ZJB0 | WD10EACS-00ZJB0 | | Revision: | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | | Smart State: | ENABLED | ENABLED | ENABLED | ENABLED | ENABLED | | Smart Error Count: | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 11 | | Raw Read Error Rate: | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | | Start/Stop Count: | 209 | 203 | 206 | 210 | 198 | | Realloc Sector Count: | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | | Power On Hours: | 13724 | 13639 | 12578 | 13752 | 14824 | | Power Cycle Count: | 10 | 11 | 15 | 10 | 11 | | Temperature (celsius): | 34 | 38 | 38 | 39 | 39 |
SO I've said it before, and I'll say it again... This box ROCKS! ;D Anyone considering getting one, it's worth every cent! |
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Post by rookie on Sept 28, 2009 4:23:04 GMT 7
Same story here, (almost) never have issues with it. Still being careful to have a backup, always...  Did you ever recreate (from scratch) a new array? I remember that from version 2.x an improvement in filesystem(s) has been introduced. From version 2.1.0.9 and up you can even use XFS (I think it will be Thecus default choice). |
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Post by Arctra on Sept 29, 2009 13:16:09 GMT 7
Oh dear! Just this morning the drive with the reallocated sector had an I/O error and stopped working altogether. Got the email, nipped home and put the replacement drive in at lunch and it's begun the rebuild again.
I haven't done a rebuild from scratch since the NAS was very new. So I haven't benefited from any new FS. Need to read up the pro's and cons of XFS vs ZFS.
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Moi
New Member
Posts: 46
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Post by Moi on Sept 29, 2009 16:29:32 GMT 7
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Post by rookie on Sept 30, 2009 17:25:21 GMT 7
I forgot to mention that I turn off the N5200 Pro everyday and it is booted automatically every day by the power-on schedule.
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Post by Arctra on Oct 5, 2009 5:54:57 GMT 7
Having done some reading now it seems XFS is the way to go for a file server rather than ZFS (my original wishlist item). Can anyone confirm that for me? Any real-world experiences that I can draw on?
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Post by polywave on Nov 8, 2009 12:48:40 GMT 7
Very interest to know how is the performance and stability about the Samsung HD154UI 1.5TB. I am thinking of replace all my 500gb drive with WD WD10EADS 1.0TB or Samsung HD154UI 1.5TB. WD WD10EADS has a very good reputation but it is more expensive than Samsung in terms of $/GB. I can got the price of Samsung HD154UI 1.5TB just 25% more than WD WD10EADS but I got 50% more capacity. Would you pls post any comparison after you upgrade to Samsung HD? Thanks a lot.
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Post by scottfern on Nov 12, 2009 0:05:07 GMT 7
I must say the performance of the Samsung HD154UI 1.5TB have been good to say the least. I am getting 30MB/sec transfers on RAID5 setup which is the same as what smallnetbuilder.com got so I am not worried that I am limited in any way.
It is very nice to go home and see the 5.4 TB of space I have for storage and its nice that I can download torrents right to the box!!!!
Would I like to see transfers in and around 60MB/sec probably but I am not willing to spend $900 on just a NAS box itself. I was able to pick up the Thecus N5200 on ebay for $400 so I am happy overall with my purchase.
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Post by dconway on Jan 27, 2010 12:37:57 GMT 7
My Macbook does its Time Machine backups to it every few hours Hi Arctra: How do you get time machine to work with the N5200? I thought the device has to be formatted with the Mac's HFS file system to have time machine work. Thanks for any tips you can provide here. |
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Post by Arctra on Jan 27, 2010 17:22:55 GMT 7
Hey mate. I can't remember exactly what I did, but I got the hint off MacOSXhints. Try this: www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080420211034137Incidentally, my box has been up a year today! Woohoo!  I just need to get 3 more 1.5TB drives and I'll be upgrading her. Love this machine!!!!!! |
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Post by Arctra on Jul 8, 2010 15:38:57 GMT 7
After 527 days of running constantly my box has just died  I got home and all the lights on it were lit up. I pulled the plug, left it a few seconds, then plugged it in again. Now it's stuck on "Self Testing..." I've left it to see if it'll restart, but I'm not holding my breath. Now I need to search here and find out what my options are. If it's stuffed, I may need to consider upgrading to one of the N7700 or N8800 - though I am not sure I'll be able to plug my HDD's straight in and recover the data. For that matter, I'm not sure I'll be able to do that if I put my discs in an identical N5200 unit  |
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Post by inerlogic on Jul 17, 2010 0:06:12 GMT 7
as long as the file system and drives aren't corrupted, you'll be able to plug the disks into another N5200 (as long as it's turned off when you do so!) and get to your data no problem.... i don't know enough about the other boxes to know whether that will work with them also...
you can put the drives in a PC running linux and recover the data also with a bit of work.... the N5200 is just a PC that runs a custom linux install....
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