Introduction

Thecus has been after me for awhile to retest its N2100 dual-drive NAS that Jim Buzbee first looked at back in June. They said the new firmware has significantly improved performance and wanted another crack at their position in our NAS Charts. So without further ado, here are the results of the retest.

Performance - 100 Mbps LAN - JBOD

As with all our NAS testing, IOzone was used to check out the file system performance on the N2100 (the full testing setup and methodology are described on this page). Tests were run in JBOD and RAID 1 modes with 100 and 1000 Mbps LAN connections. The gigabit-connected tests were run with both jumbo frame capability disabled and with 4k jumbo frames.

To ensure connection at the intended speeds, the iozone test machine and the N2100 were manually moved between a NETGEAR GS108 10/100/1000Mbps switch for gigabit-speed testing and a 10/100 switch for 100 Mbps testing.

NOTES:

• Firmware version tested was 2.1.03
• Drives used were two Seagate Barracuda ST3300831A 300GB 7200RPM SATA hard drives with 8MB of cache supplied by Thecus
• Keep in mind that the maximum raw data rate for 100Mbps Ethernet is 12500 Kbytes/sec and 125000 Kbytes/sec for gigabit

Figures 1 and 2 show write and read results respectively with a 100 Mbps LAN connection and the N2100 configured in JBOD mode. (The N2100 also supports RAID 0 in addition to JBOD and RAID 1, but I didn't test that mode.) Included in the plots are the D-Link DNS-323 and HP Media Vault, which are recently tested dual-drive NASes with similar performance. I've also included data from the original test run, indicated by "Thecus N2100 original" in each plot.

Figure 1: 100 Mbps LAN JBOD write performance (click to enlarge)

Both read and write performance have significantly improved with the new firmware. 100 Mbps JBOD write performance now ranks right after the D-Link DNS-323 and read performance is better than both the DNS-323 and HP Media Vault.

Figure 2: 100 Mbps LAN JBOD read performance (click to enlarge)

Performance - 100 Mbps LAN - RAID 1

Figures 3 and 4 show write and read results respectively with a 100 Mbps LAN connection and the N2100 configured in RAID 1 mode. Relative rankings are the same as for JBOD for both write and read, with the N2100 once again showing significantly improved performance.

Figure 3: 100 Mbps LAN RAID 1 write performance (click to enlarge)

Figure 4: 100 Mbps LAN RAID 1 read performance (click to enlarge)

Tags: NAS, RAID, Thecus,

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