Post by nwavguy on Oct 4, 2007 23:46:28 GMT 7
USER REVIEW
The History
Ok, first a bit of history... I started with home built servers running various operating systems and drive arrays. With electricity rate increases, running a full PC 7x24 was getting expensive. A 200 watt PC uses 4.8 Kwh per day. At 0.11/Kwh that's $0.53/day or almost $200 per year in electricity!
My first NAS was an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. It's a very slick and polished unit with lots of cool features and very refined firmware. It also idles at only 50 watts with the drives spinning and can shut the drives down and even turn itself on and off. Unfortunately, it uses a proprietary Infrant CPU and it's performance is pretty sad--especially from a Vista PC. Under Vista I was getting as little as 2 MB/Sec read speeds. So things like searches, indexing a music collection, backups, etc. took forever.
I wanted something that performed better. Reading reviews, the N5200 seemed to be the ticket. It offered among the best performance of all the under $1000 NAS units in early 2007 so I bought one in March. I was put off by the crude firmware, many bugs, and set up glitches. But it was fast! I was getting file transfer speeds in the 15 MB/sec - 30 MB/sec range. So after several days of testing, I moved all the data from the Infrant to the N5200 hoping Thecus would fix most of the firmware bugs along the way as it otherwise seemed like a good NAS.
As new firmware releases came out, I read about them and sadly decided to stay at 1.00.08 given all the problems people were having, and the new bugs created by Thecus. At least 1.00.08 seemed to serve up my data OK--even if half the other stuff didn't work right.
N5200 Fails...Data Lost...
A few weeks ago anything on my network that needed access to the N5200 first slowed and ultimately ground to a halt. I tried to log on but only got as far as my username and password before it stopped responding. I went to the N5200 and noticed the orange "upgrade" LED was on. Thinking it might be somehow trying to upgrade itself
I left it alone for several hours. But there was no change. I pushed the power switch, it beeped, but never shut down. Oddly, through all this, the LCD display was still flipping through the normal info showing everything as healthy! Yeah right. 
The N5200 very much acted like an application does when it runs out of memory. Perhaps the buggy N5200 firmware has a memory leak? And after running for several months my N5200 simply ran out memory and slowly crashed? I wasn't running any add-ons/plug ins.
After holding the power switch to cause a hard shutdown, it re-booted, but there was some serious data corruption from all the files that were open when it crashed (and even some that I don't think were open). I was afraid to run the File System Check as others have reported their N5200 became completely unaccessible after doing so!
So, the already marginal confidence I had in the N5200 was pretty much destroyed when it corrupted my data--the one thing a NAS should never do. It didn't help any to log in here to find others are also having major problems, and that the latest firmware is still full of bugs--including some serious new ones.
Data Integrity
I was always worried about what would happen to my data on the N5200 if the power went out and the UPS battery died? I'd already tested that and found it didn't properly shut itself down (yet another firmware bug). What if the UPS died during a write to the drives? What would happen to the array, open files, and my data?
Or what if a drive failed, and with the e-mail notification not working, would I know before a second drive failed taking all my data with it? As discussed at the link below, along with some other good info about data integrity, drives often fail in pairs:
www.nber.org/sys-admin/linux-nas-raid.html
Or what if a N5200 drive started to get flakey but didn't hard fail? Would the buggy Thecus firmware properly go into degraded mode and lock out the flakey but still working drive? Or would the array get corrupted? The inability of Thecus to fix even simple basic stuff doesn't give me much confidence?
Keep in mind the RAID array in virtually all these NAS units is proprietary. If something goes wrong with the NAS (including a motherboard problem, etc.) your only realistic chance at recovering your data is to move the drives to another identical NAS unit running compatible firmware. So if the NAS itself screws up your array, you can probably forget ever recovering the proprietary format data.
Zyxel NSA-2400
Doing more research, I found some newer NAS devices have come out since the N5200. Of those, the Zyxel NSA-2400 looked to be the most promising for my needs based on 3 different reviews I found. Here's the most comprehensive one:
www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30155/75/
It's more of a business-class NAS versus a unit designed for home use. Zyxel is a business products networking company and it shows in the NSA-2400's features, etc. The street price, about $700 USD with no drives, is about the same as the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ and just slightly more than the N5200.
The Zyxel uses a 1.3 Ghz Via Pentium-compatible low power CPU. The Via CPUs offer very high performance per watt and run standard x86 software (i.e. they can use an off the shelf Linux kernel instead of a custom one like Infrant is forced to use). So, like the N5200, the Zyxel has much better performance than most of the home NAS units which use slower CPUs. Why Infrant didn't go this route, I'll never know?
Things I really like about the NSA-2400:
The firmware is 100% solid so far. Everything I've tried has worked the first time without any work arounds, glitches, or failures.
The firmware is generally polished with helpful tips on some screens, warning dialogs, clear English, etc. It's also much more responsive than the Infrant's web interface.
The benchmarks in the reviews show 15MB/sec - 30 MB/sec performance very similar to the N5200. I'm typically getting around 13 MB/sec - 20 MB/sec real world speeds from Vista using RAID5 and a gigabit LAN. This is double to triple the Infrant's real world speeds even with their Vista patch and close to what you get using a fast PC as a server.
It uses a silent external "brick" power supply. This keeps the power supply heat out of the NAS and doesn't require a small high pitched noisy fan like the one in the N5200. The brick must be efficient as it runs fairly cool.
It has 2 very quiet cooling fans. The drives make more noise than the fans and I have fairly quiet drives.
It uses less power than the N5200. It runs about about 60 watts idling versus 85 watts for a 5 drive Thecus. The Thecus with only 4 drives would use about 75 watts. 15 watts savings is 131 Kwh or $15/year.
It has several different options for data protection that actually work. The Zyxel can back itself up directly to a USB attached device or (I haven't tried this) another NSA-2400 over the network. With the Thecus, all I could ever do was pull all of the data to a PC and send it somewhere else. That ties up a PC and is slower. The Zyxel can schedule its own self-contained backups--either snapshots or to an external device.
It keeps a detailed log and can e-mail you a summary daily, weekly, or monthly. And that's in addition to any critical alerts that get e-mailed. Unlike the N5200, all of it actually works.
Also unlike the N5200, the Zyxel UPS support works by shutting down the NAS when the UPS battery is low. This is a big data integrity issue (see above).
Zyxel is a large networking company that makes high-end commercial firewall appliances, etc. They appear to know a lot more about firmware than Thecus does. They also write much better user guides and documentation and have a better website.
Potential negatives with the Zyxel:
The Zyxel only holds 4 drives, not 5 like the N5200.
There's no provision to spin the drives down after a period of inactivity. The N5200 has that feature, but my Thecus never spun down even with the LAN unplugged. It does work on the Infrant.
There's no media server options so if you need that, you either need to use a music/media player that can pull data directly from a network share (many can), let a PC stream data from the Zyxel, or use a different NAS.
I'm not sure what it's doing, but even with the LAN unplugged, the NSA-2400 accesses the drives every 5 seconds or so. The drive seek noise is a bit annoying, and it's causing some wear and tear on the drives that doesn't seem necessary? Of course, Windows mostly does the same thing. If Zyxel would add a spin-down feature, it would fix this.
The firmware is generally very good about warning you before it lets you do anything drastic. But I did find out when you change your Windows Workgroup name, and click Apply, the Zyxel promptly announces it's re-booting without giving you a chance to close any active sessions first. But this isn't likely a problem as you normally only change the workgroup name once at initial set up.
While it shows you the CPU temp (and usage), it doesn't give you drive temps like the Infrant does.
The web interface is a bit more sluggish than the N5200 (but much faster than the Infrant's).
The firmware isn't open source and there are no plug-ins/add ons. But, for my needs, this isn't an issue. I'm big on data security and hacking my NAS isn't something I'm interested in.
Conclusion:
So far so good with the NSA-2400. The performance is close to the N5200 and vastly better than the Infrant. It took a while for the N5200 to trash my data, so time will tell? But I already have vastly more confidence in the Zyxel firmware compared to the half baked Thecus. The Zyxel engineers seem to know what they're doing.
One tip: If you're using Windows PCs, and do not have a domain controller, make sure the Workgroup name matches on all your PCs and the Zyxel. If it doesn't, you will get some permission and access problems with two different users trying to use the same share. This is true for the Infrant as well but the N5200 seemed more tolerant of workgroup name differences for some reason.
I'll report back if I have any problems with the Zyxel but for now I'm happy with it.
The History
Ok, first a bit of history... I started with home built servers running various operating systems and drive arrays. With electricity rate increases, running a full PC 7x24 was getting expensive. A 200 watt PC uses 4.8 Kwh per day. At 0.11/Kwh that's $0.53/day or almost $200 per year in electricity!
My first NAS was an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. It's a very slick and polished unit with lots of cool features and very refined firmware. It also idles at only 50 watts with the drives spinning and can shut the drives down and even turn itself on and off. Unfortunately, it uses a proprietary Infrant CPU and it's performance is pretty sad--especially from a Vista PC. Under Vista I was getting as little as 2 MB/Sec read speeds. So things like searches, indexing a music collection, backups, etc. took forever.
I wanted something that performed better. Reading reviews, the N5200 seemed to be the ticket. It offered among the best performance of all the under $1000 NAS units in early 2007 so I bought one in March. I was put off by the crude firmware, many bugs, and set up glitches. But it was fast! I was getting file transfer speeds in the 15 MB/sec - 30 MB/sec range. So after several days of testing, I moved all the data from the Infrant to the N5200 hoping Thecus would fix most of the firmware bugs along the way as it otherwise seemed like a good NAS.
As new firmware releases came out, I read about them and sadly decided to stay at 1.00.08 given all the problems people were having, and the new bugs created by Thecus. At least 1.00.08 seemed to serve up my data OK--even if half the other stuff didn't work right.
N5200 Fails...Data Lost...
A few weeks ago anything on my network that needed access to the N5200 first slowed and ultimately ground to a halt. I tried to log on but only got as far as my username and password before it stopped responding. I went to the N5200 and noticed the orange "upgrade" LED was on. Thinking it might be somehow trying to upgrade itself
I left it alone for several hours. But there was no change. I pushed the power switch, it beeped, but never shut down. Oddly, through all this, the LCD display was still flipping through the normal info showing everything as healthy! Yeah right. 
The N5200 very much acted like an application does when it runs out of memory. Perhaps the buggy N5200 firmware has a memory leak? And after running for several months my N5200 simply ran out memory and slowly crashed? I wasn't running any add-ons/plug ins.
After holding the power switch to cause a hard shutdown, it re-booted, but there was some serious data corruption from all the files that were open when it crashed (and even some that I don't think were open). I was afraid to run the File System Check as others have reported their N5200 became completely unaccessible after doing so!
So, the already marginal confidence I had in the N5200 was pretty much destroyed when it corrupted my data--the one thing a NAS should never do. It didn't help any to log in here to find others are also having major problems, and that the latest firmware is still full of bugs--including some serious new ones.
Data Integrity
I was always worried about what would happen to my data on the N5200 if the power went out and the UPS battery died? I'd already tested that and found it didn't properly shut itself down (yet another firmware bug). What if the UPS died during a write to the drives? What would happen to the array, open files, and my data?
Or what if a drive failed, and with the e-mail notification not working, would I know before a second drive failed taking all my data with it? As discussed at the link below, along with some other good info about data integrity, drives often fail in pairs:
www.nber.org/sys-admin/linux-nas-raid.html
Or what if a N5200 drive started to get flakey but didn't hard fail? Would the buggy Thecus firmware properly go into degraded mode and lock out the flakey but still working drive? Or would the array get corrupted? The inability of Thecus to fix even simple basic stuff doesn't give me much confidence?
Keep in mind the RAID array in virtually all these NAS units is proprietary. If something goes wrong with the NAS (including a motherboard problem, etc.) your only realistic chance at recovering your data is to move the drives to another identical NAS unit running compatible firmware. So if the NAS itself screws up your array, you can probably forget ever recovering the proprietary format data.
Zyxel NSA-2400
Doing more research, I found some newer NAS devices have come out since the N5200. Of those, the Zyxel NSA-2400 looked to be the most promising for my needs based on 3 different reviews I found. Here's the most comprehensive one:
www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30155/75/
It's more of a business-class NAS versus a unit designed for home use. Zyxel is a business products networking company and it shows in the NSA-2400's features, etc. The street price, about $700 USD with no drives, is about the same as the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ and just slightly more than the N5200.
The Zyxel uses a 1.3 Ghz Via Pentium-compatible low power CPU. The Via CPUs offer very high performance per watt and run standard x86 software (i.e. they can use an off the shelf Linux kernel instead of a custom one like Infrant is forced to use). So, like the N5200, the Zyxel has much better performance than most of the home NAS units which use slower CPUs. Why Infrant didn't go this route, I'll never know?
Things I really like about the NSA-2400:
The firmware is 100% solid so far. Everything I've tried has worked the first time without any work arounds, glitches, or failures.
The firmware is generally polished with helpful tips on some screens, warning dialogs, clear English, etc. It's also much more responsive than the Infrant's web interface.
The benchmarks in the reviews show 15MB/sec - 30 MB/sec performance very similar to the N5200. I'm typically getting around 13 MB/sec - 20 MB/sec real world speeds from Vista using RAID5 and a gigabit LAN. This is double to triple the Infrant's real world speeds even with their Vista patch and close to what you get using a fast PC as a server.
It uses a silent external "brick" power supply. This keeps the power supply heat out of the NAS and doesn't require a small high pitched noisy fan like the one in the N5200. The brick must be efficient as it runs fairly cool.
It has 2 very quiet cooling fans. The drives make more noise than the fans and I have fairly quiet drives.
It uses less power than the N5200. It runs about about 60 watts idling versus 85 watts for a 5 drive Thecus. The Thecus with only 4 drives would use about 75 watts. 15 watts savings is 131 Kwh or $15/year.
It has several different options for data protection that actually work. The Zyxel can back itself up directly to a USB attached device or (I haven't tried this) another NSA-2400 over the network. With the Thecus, all I could ever do was pull all of the data to a PC and send it somewhere else. That ties up a PC and is slower. The Zyxel can schedule its own self-contained backups--either snapshots or to an external device.
It keeps a detailed log and can e-mail you a summary daily, weekly, or monthly. And that's in addition to any critical alerts that get e-mailed. Unlike the N5200, all of it actually works.
Also unlike the N5200, the Zyxel UPS support works by shutting down the NAS when the UPS battery is low. This is a big data integrity issue (see above).
Zyxel is a large networking company that makes high-end commercial firewall appliances, etc. They appear to know a lot more about firmware than Thecus does. They also write much better user guides and documentation and have a better website.
Potential negatives with the Zyxel:
The Zyxel only holds 4 drives, not 5 like the N5200.
There's no provision to spin the drives down after a period of inactivity. The N5200 has that feature, but my Thecus never spun down even with the LAN unplugged. It does work on the Infrant.
There's no media server options so if you need that, you either need to use a music/media player that can pull data directly from a network share (many can), let a PC stream data from the Zyxel, or use a different NAS.
I'm not sure what it's doing, but even with the LAN unplugged, the NSA-2400 accesses the drives every 5 seconds or so. The drive seek noise is a bit annoying, and it's causing some wear and tear on the drives that doesn't seem necessary? Of course, Windows mostly does the same thing. If Zyxel would add a spin-down feature, it would fix this.
The firmware is generally very good about warning you before it lets you do anything drastic. But I did find out when you change your Windows Workgroup name, and click Apply, the Zyxel promptly announces it's re-booting without giving you a chance to close any active sessions first. But this isn't likely a problem as you normally only change the workgroup name once at initial set up.
While it shows you the CPU temp (and usage), it doesn't give you drive temps like the Infrant does.
The web interface is a bit more sluggish than the N5200 (but much faster than the Infrant's).
The firmware isn't open source and there are no plug-ins/add ons. But, for my needs, this isn't an issue. I'm big on data security and hacking my NAS isn't something I'm interested in.
Conclusion:
So far so good with the NSA-2400. The performance is close to the N5200 and vastly better than the Infrant. It took a while for the N5200 to trash my data, so time will tell? But I already have vastly more confidence in the Zyxel firmware compared to the half baked Thecus. The Zyxel engineers seem to know what they're doing.
One tip: If you're using Windows PCs, and do not have a domain controller, make sure the Workgroup name matches on all your PCs and the Zyxel. If it doesn't, you will get some permission and access problems with two different users trying to use the same share. This is true for the Infrant as well but the N5200 seemed more tolerant of workgroup name differences for some reason.
I'll report back if I have any problems with the Zyxel but for now I'm happy with it.
do. All problems that have come out so far is because of problems primarily in the scripts that uses the data collected from the web interface, and not the underlying Linux system itself. Although I have never had a single problem with my unit, knock on wood, I also don't care to use all the features that some who are having problem have used.