5200B Pro Review

[localj]

I recently bought the Thecus 5200B Pro and thought I would share my experience. It has been positive considering I bought it to use iSCSI.

The default iSCSI ietd.conf configuration is wrong for the use I wanted - iSCSI storage for VMware ESX 3.01. Hence I headed down the Modules path.

Installed 5x500GB sataII disks, powered up and created a RAID 5 set with XX% set aside to iSCSI. I then walked away for a day while it completed the format of the RAID. Many options on this device are not available until after you have created the RAID set.

Then next morning I installed 4 modules on it.
1) IMGDUP and enable,
2) SYS and enable, set password
3) SSHD and enable, check you can SSH in
4) MLDonkey

It seems IMGDUP must be installed first and enabled before any other modules if you intend to modify the default read only configuration. Otherwise weird things happen.

Modified the /img/bin/iscsi script to create the ietd.conf file I wanted for Vmware ESX. For those interested it should look something like this:

Target iqn.2007-05.com.bujold:storage.san
Lun 0 Path=/raid/blah/blah,Type=fileio
Alias iSCSI
MaxConnections 8
InitialR2T Yes

The MLdonkey Core is nice if you use eMule and BitTorrent and want to have the Thecus 5200 do the downloads rather than your PC. I recommend using the Sancho client (Windows / Mac / Linux)

The media server works well, so does NFS, FTP, and CIFS.

Maybe I will get the OpenVPN working next - its used by NSync so already present on the system just waiting to be configured up :-)

[mrmin123]

Just a question, could you set the entire raid to iSCSI (100%)? I'm not very familiar with the iSCSI technology...

[localj]

Yes (from memory) you could set it to 100% for iSCSI. There was a pull down box in the web interface and you could select 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 .......100 percent for iSCSI of the RAID set you have created.

You can only create one iSCSI target though.

[quick]

>You can only create one iSCSI target though.

Not alot flexible in my opinion.

You sure about this?

[usernametaken]

what speeds are you getting over iSCSI ?

[localj]

I am sure about the one iSCSI target.

As for speeds I am getting very good (30+ Mbps) on read with Gig ethernet. Also multiple PCs reading concurrently works well.

Write speeds are another story. The Thecus uses a software raid so it needs to use CPU cycles to generate parity when it writes to disks.

So when writing a small amount of data I get 30+ Mbps. When I write large chunks of data I get high speed, pause while it does parity and writes, high speed again, pause, ........ probably averages 15+ Mbps.

The software raid makes it unsuitable for multiple concurrent large writes eg. 1 x ESX host good; 2 x ESX host bad.