Thecus N5200: Screaming fast, but plenty rough around the edges

Performance - 100 Mbps

As I do with all NAS testing, I used IOzone to check out the file system performance on the 5200 (the full testing setup and methodology are described on this page). I connect everything to a NETGEAR GS108 10/100/1000Mbps switch for gigabit-speed testing. The GS108 I have supports jumbo frame testing, which all currently-shipping versions should now also support.

NOTES:

• Firmware version tested was 1.00.03
• Default RAID settings were used, which included a 64 KB stripe size.
• Drives used were five Western Digital WD3200KS-00PFB0 320GB 7200RPM SATA hard drives with 16MB 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

I first tested the N5200 in JBOD and RAID5 modes with a 100 Mbps LAN connection. The results are shown in Figures N and N along with results from comparable products, i.e. the Synology CS-406 and Buffalo Terastation. Any data points that lie above the 100 Mbps Ethernet line are due to caching effects.

Figure 20 shows that the N5200 is at the top of the chart in both JBOD and RAID 5 modes when writing.

Figure 20: Write performance comparison - 100Mbps (click image to enlarge)

Read performance shown in Figure 21 is a bit more of a horse race since caching is out of the picture. Once again, the N5200 is the best of the bunch, with closely-matched JBOD and RAID5 results.

Figure 21: Read performance comparison - 100Mbps (click image to enlarge)