Thecus N5550 NAS Server Review

Benchmarks:

CrystalDiskMark:

Although I never expect to go into this particular test expecting a 1Gb connected NAS device to perform the same as a direct attached RAW drive, it’s always good to get an idea of what the expected performance delta will be for the particular drives you intend to install into your NAS versus the advertised speeds of the drives if they were direct attached to a storage controller.

For this test, I ran CrystalDiskMark on a single RAW drive attached to a storage controller versus a single drive configured as an iSCSI target on the Thecus N5550. The results were good in that both the read and write performance of the drive configured as an iSCSI target were near identical. So the Thecus N5550 doesn’t appear to be tuned for writes or reads specifically. We have seen some NAS devices favor either reads or writes in the past, so it’s good to see that the Thecus treats read/write I/O fairly.

File Transfer Tests:

For a basic file transfer test, I configured a share/pool that was comprised of four drives in a RAID 0, for maximum performance (multiple spindles, with no redundancy overhead placed on the CPU). I tested a single 3GB file and a single 1GB file, as I wanted to see the performance delta, if any, between a file larger and smaller than the amount of installed RAM. Based on my findings, the Thecus N5550 obviously leverages the installed RAM for writes (not that all uncommon), but what is interesting is that with only 2GB of RAM installed, the different file sizes didn’t seem to be as large of a variable as I would have expected.

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