Living in the age of stupidly low prices for PCs it's no surprise to find multiple of them per household. More people are getting familiar with home networking and network attached peripherals, the ease of having all your data centralized and always accessible has brought us home grade network attached storage (NAS) devices and more and more do we find this kind of external storage taking place in non-industry/office environments. NAS will keep on charming more people in the near future without doubt and so this [M]reviewer found it was about time to upgrade his own external data storage device.

Thecus to the rescue



Founded in 2004 Thecus is a relatively new player in pc consumer market, though they speak of decades of R&D experience. How's that? Well Thecus was originally part of the hardware department from Abit Computer for several years. At the time Abit saw the immature but yet huge market for storage and spent resource to develop storage products. In 2004 Edwin Lin, general manager of the Abit R&D team, took one step further and founded Thecus Technology Corp. and became an independent organization dedicated 100% to storage. So taking account of the development period, Thecus had been doing storage for almost 10 years. Their first successful project was the first ever 4 bay NAS with Intel’s IOP in 2005. In 2007, they introduced the 1st 5 bay NAS (with Intel Celeron) and also the 1st NAS with iSCSI. They established solid relationship with Intel since and opened up the storage market for Intel. The picture below represents the current product line starting from consumer 2 bay (2 HDDs) NAS up to enterprise 8 bays (2U rack mount) NAS. They also have 3 pure iSCSI products for high-end enterprise applications.



Today we'll be looking at the N2200, an advanced NAS for home entertainment:



Features:

Status At-a-Glance: front LCD displaying the status

Easy to Set Up, Easy to Use: AJAX web based interaface and one-click USB disk backup, backup and synchronizing software

Enterprise-Class Data Protection At Home: RAID 0, 1, and JBOD, auto-rebuild, hot swapping

Rich and Friendly Multimedia Features: iTunes server, photo web server, media server (DLNA/uPnP compatiable), http, FTP, BT, and eMule download, USB/IP webcam

Quietly Saving Money: as low as 11W, near noiseless

While the main goal is securing data, the extra features makes live just a tad easier, for instance the USB quick copy feature, while other features are just very useful to have included in this package (security cam for example). The merrier the options, the more people will feel related to this product...
Quanta costa? € 159, for that price you can't build your own home server, but does this mean it is worth the asking price? I took my time to experiment and check out all the possibilities, features and performance of the N2200 to see if it is justified to spend this amount of money for a product which on its own doesn't do really more then 'keeping data secure' and ‘accessible’.

Inside the box

The N2200 comes in a cube box which is nicely decorated with product features, even with this Thecus NAS kind of looking like a bread toaster it should be clear to most people it most certainly is an IT product. The small box makes you aware that this dual 3,5" data carrier is not much greater than the HDD's inside of it, that's a relief for those who want to carry it around I guess, for me this mostly means I can perfectly place it next to my ADSL router, a centralized location for my local area network.



Inside all the basic stuff you need:

N2200 Unit x1

(2.5”+3.5”) HDD Tray x2 (Installed)

Power Adaptor + Power cord x1

QIG (Quick Installation Guide) x1

Install CD x1

Ethernet Cable x1

Screw Kit bag x1

HDD Compatibility list Card x1

Multiple Languages Warranty Card x1



Like mentioned earlier, the Thecus N2200 is rather compact given all the features it supports, it has room for dual 3,5" hard disk drives and somewhere in between those there's the embedded x86 compatible controller hardware. The body is made out of thick brushed aluminium and looks like the first generation Lian-Li products. The top of the N2200 body has small cooling fins while the side panels are slightly rounded given it a kind of performance and clean/slick look. Total dimensions: (w)115mm x (l)210mm x (h)140mm.



A front sight at the N2200 shows us the plastics doors and the front status display, opening these doors reveals sliding HDD trays which makes the data drives hot pluggable and quick to install/replace. Under the status display you'll find a front USB port and a USB copy button, this makes copying/securing USB data very quickly. At the back you'll find a reset button, DC power plug, a gigabit RJ-45 network connector and 3 more USB 2.0 ports. USB port can be used in many different ways: reading UPS status, connecting an USB printer, connecting a webcam, connecting USB storage.

The front display allows you to check the status of the N2200 in just a blink of an eye. Here is a sum up: Power button/led The power button lets you turn on/off the N2200, a solid blue LED shows that the system is ready while a blinking blue LED means that the system is rebuilding. LCD HDD 1 LED: Blinking Yellow: HDD activity HDD 1 LED: Blinking Red: HDD failure HDD 2 LED: Blinking Yellow: HDD activity HDD 2 LED: Blinking Red: HDD failure WAN LED: Blinking green: network activity USB Copy: Blinking Blue: USB Copy activity USB Copy: Blinking Red: USB Copy failure

This is how the mini motherboard looks like:



The mainboard is based upon the Oxford OXE810DSE, onboard we find an integrated ARM926EJ-S processor running at 367MHz. The Advanced RISC Machine processor features a memory management unit and comes with 32kb cache, the Thecus runs on Linux. Furthermore you'll find Winbond W19B320BT 32Mbit single bank CMOS flash memory and Elpida EDE1108AFBG 800MHz DDR2 memory (5-5-5).



Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) is a mayor producer of RISC processors. Starting from a group of roughly 30 person in the UK they were the first to develop a commercial RISC cpu, over the years however they've grown to a company with 1700 employees located in many different nations like the US, Japan and yes even Belgium (however I heard rumors about the Belgian site that it will be closed in 2010). Initially named Acorn Computer Group, the company name ARM first appears back in 1990 when Apple and Acorn join forces to create a new microprocessor standard. Before the end of 2008 ARM had shipped their 10 billionth processor, their main goal is the embedded market in which they hold a large market share, the competition is on though with Intel and AMD investing more and more in low-power solutions.

The ARM926EJ-S processor is a RISC processor based upon the ARMv5TE architecture featuring a 5 stage pipeline and Linux, Windows CE and Symbian OS support. In contrary to Intel's and AMD'x x86 CISC (Complex instruction set computers) processors, the RISC (Reduced instruction set computer) processor comes with a less complex design and a smaller instruction set. RISC processor need more instructions compared to CISC processors but the RISC processor is fast in data execution and thus both designs are roughly same in performance, the less complex design and smaller instruction set makes the RISC processor less power hungry though. Examples of RISC based computers: Sun's UltraSPARC and IBM's PowerPC.

Installation & troubleshooting

Although Thecus claims it setup is quick and easy it took me few hours to get it all working properly. Installing the hard drives goes very quick: the drive holder slides in and out and the hard drive is tightened to the drive holder with 4 screws. With that you only have to connect to UTP cable and power adapter and in under 5 minutes you have the device ready for configuring. This did not go as good as it was suppose to be though, with everything set up correctly the N2200 refused to boot. We noticed the AC adapter power led was illuminated and few minutes later measuring and testing around I noticed how the DC power connector which plugs at the back of the N2200 was having some kind of bad contact.

Lucky me I'm a handy guy, I had another power plug laying around so I replaced it with the original é voila, I was good to go. I booted up my portable and inserted the Thecus software cd-rom, few clicks later the Smart Utility tool was installed, though when trying to set-up the N2200 I received the message that the device type is newer than the software version. So the added cd-rom is too outdated for the N2200? Yes, I paid a visit to the Thecus website and noticed software version 1.00.12 was available where the cd-rom version was 1.00.10. I also noticed a new firmware version, before continuing I thought to myself it wouldn't be a bad idea to upgrade to this new firmware version, I don't want to find out more problems later on when everything has been set up.

I downloaded and flashed firmware version v3.00.08, original firmware: v3.00.07E. Open the web interface and look under System Management->Firmware upgrade. It takes few minutes, it's not as fast as upgrading a motherboard bios, just have some patience here. I suggest our readers to do the same thing, leave the cd-rom for what it is and go straight forward to the Support page on the Thecus website.


hard disc drives are tightened with 4 mounting screws onto a metallic slider making them easy accessible and hot pluggable.

So how is the Thecus Smart Utility? Well during setup is nicely ask you if you want to add it to system boot, after that it auto searches for any Thecus network connected device, if your firewall isn't configured correctly yet then adjust its configuration and rescan. Next you get to choose the installation mode, you can choose between 'quick' or 'manual', to see how quick 'quick' is I went for the first option, the tool then starts configuring the N2200, you may notice the front displaying now doing all kind of stuff and few minutes later the configuration tool is near complete, a new Windows 7 windows pops upon with displaying the content of the N2200 network location.

In the Smart Utility you now get to choose between 'set backup task' and 'start browser', or you can just exit. I wanted to check it the browser configuring app so I took the 2nd option here, a new webbrowser tab popped open with the Thecus’ ip address in its address bar. You get three login tabs: Login, Web Disk and Photo server. Hmm, login details... there are none inside the quick setup guide so back to searching the cd-rom, I preferred paying another visit to the Thecus website and found out the default login is: admin and password: admin.

Features explored

Main goal here is RAID Network Attached Storage, aside of that we see many extra features to extend the usability and the value of the product. Let's overview the N2200 configuration menu:

System Information: under system information one can check the product info, revision, online time, cpu load and which services are running (FTP, NFS, ...). Aside of that there's also a log section where you can see all system events.

System Management: in the system management module one can properly manage the machine behaviour of the N2200. You can set up the time zone and sync it with an NTP server. You can set up email notification events, upgrade the firmware and configure scheduled power on/off actions. If your UPS is supported this is also the place you would want to look for to check/monitor its status. More? Yes, in the utility's tab you can change the admin password, return to factory default configuration, upload/download a saved configuration file, reboot & shutdown and perform a file system check.

System Network: much like the system management module this is another setup module but much more network orientated. Here you can set up, enable and configure the various network services. For starters you can configure the LAN network connection (static/dynamic) and set up FTP access. You can enable uPnP, Samba, AFP, NFS, Bonjour and Media server services, but you can also enable and set up the http TCP/IP port which you would want to use when trying to access the N2200 from WAN. Furthermore here you can enable which directories you would want to share or not over the network/WAN.

Storage: all this related to disk storage you'll find in the Storage menu. You can view disk and raid status and properties, you can create or edit your RAID array, there is the option to manage the disk power management and it is also the place to add/delete new directories on the RAID setup. Plus, when you want to load ISO files, look in the storage menu because that where it's placed. The content of the mounted ISO will be displayed as part of the directory where the ISO file is located.

User and Group Authentication: the menu title explains everything, user and name and password can be made here plus you can link them with certain user groups. Batch input is supported via files containing following content: (ex. Student1,password1,student_group).

Application Server: aside of the casual storage server services you also have to ability to enable and use applications which you can find on more traditional desktop pc systems. the Printer sub menu let's you add a USB printer and share it over the LAN, in the iTunes sub menu you can enable and configure iTunes an Apple iTunes compatible media server. The server will now appear in any iTunes program running on the local network.

Module Management: in the module management menu one can add new applications, set them up and use them properly. New modules are available on the Thecus website and can be uploading using the N2200 web interface.

DLM2: a download manager which lets you manage Bittorrent, Emule and HTTP/FTP downloads.

Simple surveillance: a tool which recognizes USB webcams and shares them over the LAN

BI directional USB copy: synchronises external USB storage apparatus with the internal eSATA drives in a shared folder.
Some of these apps are also compatible with other Thecus N2200 devices which might make it interesting for future program developments.

Backup: backup capabilities are added and utilize the LAN interface. Over the network you can make backups to target servers/NAS/Rsync servers using login usernames and passwords. Backups can be scheduled on a daily, weekly or monthly base, synchronized or incremental and per shared folder. The Nsync menu also let's you restore from older back up files.

Using the N2200

As always with something new you have to get used to its unique interface, same goes with the N2200. First few hours you'll spend time discovering all the N2200's possibilities and submenus, but after that you'll navigate around quite fluently. The menu is maybe not always that well organised, for example you can find the iTunes server config menu under the 'application server' menu, though the FTP server config menu is found under 'System Network'. I agree that it makes some sense but I have a feeling the AppServer menu was not really needed here and could perfectly be integrated somewhere else.

Another issue might be that some webcams might not be supported, same goes for printers. Aside of that I found the menu lacking in speed, every time you switch from menu a loading window appears and the screen idles for roughly 5s. Discovering the different functions of your product becomes a time consuming job this way, once everything has been set up this is no longer an issue though.

Like mentioned earlier, you should most certainly pay a visit to the download/support section on the Thecus website, you'll find some extra apps and firmware upgrades over there. Installing these software packages also takes some time, plus you must know that they're not installed on dedicated memory meaning that once you change RAID configuration you must also reinstall each app plus you'll also have to redo the firmware upgrade which you might have installed previously. It's good that Thecus is still working on improvements; some of these extra tools might come in handy still I'd love to see some more advanced or in depth changes too for the services that come out-of-the-box (i.e. user authentication).

Performance tests

For testing purposes I've set up a network with a D-link 665 gigabit router, the Thecus N2200 NAS and a self-build desktop pc with gigabit Ethernet onboard, all connected with UTP cat-5e cable. I've performed 2 tests: one synthetic read/write test using the ATTO disk benchmarking tool with the Thecus storage mapped as Z drive, and one by setting up an ftp session between desktop pc and the N2200 NAS. To validate my result I've set up the desktop unit with a WinXP install on a WD320gb HDD, afterwards I repeated my tests but with Corsair X128 SSD and Win7 install.



With the upgrade of my home network to gigabit LAN I did expect to see some great performance numbers, unfortunately during my first tests I already noticed that the N2200 isn't the fastest NAS you've seen, with read speed at 15~20Mb per second there is hardly the benefit over 100Mbit lan. The type of RAID configuration did not have a noticeable impact on the results here.



Write speed results are different, we see the same performance stagnating at 64k~128k data size, though in RAID 1 config the write speed is slightly greater than the read speed. Same goes for a JBOD config where we see write speed at roughly 20Mb/s average where read speed would hardly top out 15MB/s.



The reason why we see the performance stagnating at 64~128k data size is because of the way the RAID is configured. During our install we have only the option to choice which type of RAID config you want to have. The RAID stripe size is set to 64k. Averaging our results we can easily see there is no real difference when comparing RAID 0, 1 and JBOD read speed, however when looking at write speed we see RAID 0 come in as slowest begging the question why you would ever want to opt for RAID 0 and not JBOD or RAID 1.



In our FTP session test we first copied a self-made image of the District 9 movie towards the N2200 and so obtained our "write" result, afterwards we copied the image back to our test desktop pc. Roughly following the trend of the ATTO synthetic benchmark results we can now again conclude that RAID 0 is lagging behind RAID 1 and JBOD, this time though the read results are little bit higher.

Performance influences

During our tests I noticed how the results would not always follow the same trend and that made us believe that the unit's processing power is holding back some top notch results. To proof our point we're for once not going to overclock the IT-machinery, no we're going to put some extra load on N2200's cpu.

I've tried reading and writing to the Thecus NAS from difference machines but I noticed this has no influence, yet when I enabled or disabled some of its services, performance went down noticeable.

Here is a screenshot taken with most services disabled, like we used for our tests on previous page:



And here is another shot with some services enabled, do notice the difference in X-scale though!



It kind of depends on what services you want to run, and how much you demand from these services. I've seen worse results than these pictured above but it's not always easy to make a duplicate of them, my point was only to proof that there is a performance impact anyway. Just to give you an idea:

FTP read session with services disabled: 19,15 MB/s

FTP read session with services enabled: 8,20 MB/s

Power consumption

Power consumption was measured using an ITC-996 digital multimeter combined with a Velleman DCM270 AC/DC clamp meter. Where the ITC multimeter registers the voltage, the Velleman AC clamp meter measures the AC current, multiplying these results gives you the power consumption measured at the wall plug, power supply included.



Here are the results:

Power Saving mode: 230V * 0,055A = 12,85W

Idle: 227V * 0,085A = 19,55W

During FTP write session (RAID 1): 230V * 0,1A = 23W

During FTP read session (RAID 1) with multiple services enabled: 230V * 0,090A = 20,7W

While performance is not what you'd get when using a real server system, we must say that the N2200 is a real champ when it comes to power usage.


Conclusive thoughts

Coming to the end of our article let's wrap up. With the Thecus N2200 you'll get a slick looking home NAS solution which offers some handy options like power saving, IP security camera server, quick backup station, and many more. It can easily be integrated in your digital media network but it can also be configured to work as a server system. With read/write speeds around 15~20Mb/s it's far from the fastest unit you've ever seen, and do keep in mind that it lacks cpu power so if you want to keep performance up then you'll better not turn every service option on. We also did not find any real speed advantages of changes the type of RAID config, JBOD comes out fastest but the difference with the much safer RAID 1 is not that big.

What I did not like about this product is that some of its features don't work that great at all and may hold you back from using them. Security options are far from advanced either, but I guess that's what you get when choosing for a NAS device for "home user market". On a positive note, Thecus is still developing and working on software updates and I'm curious to see what they will come up with next, maybe you could post your suggestions at www.thecus.com ;)

Price wise expect to pay roughly € 180. A competitive price if you ask me, not as cheap as usual network drives but don't forget the many features that are build in: the N2200 can be a replacement for your small home server.

+ Many features
+ Not complicated to set up
+ Look goods
+ Silent
+ Not power hungry
+ Competitive price: € 179

- Slow user interface
- Slow read/write speeds
- No performance benefit from using RAID0
- Some features do not work as you'd expect

Before we take off let me thank David from Thecus Netherlands to help us out with a review sample, I hope you liked reading our article and I hope you found something useful in it as well. Hasta luego!