Reviews

Thecus N16000 review

Thecus' latest N16000 NAS appliance combines support for 6Gbit/s SAS drives and high performance networking. Dave Mitchell plugs it into his 10-Gigabit Ethernet network and takes it for a high-speed test drive so read this UK exclusive review to see how it fared.

13 Jun 2011

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The N16000 runs the same firmware as all current Thecus NAS appliances so the majority of features are consistent across the entire family. Installation using the Setup Wizard is a swift process and for testing we configured six Seagate Cheetah 6Gbit/s SAS disks as a RAID-5 array which took a couple of hours to build.

The N16000 provides the same web interface as Thecus’ smaller NAS appliances and has the same base set of storage features.

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The N16000's web interface.

The hard disks are only used for storage but fault tolerance extends to the operating system as this is protected by Thecus' dual-DOMs. The second module maintains a backup copy which is called up if the primary one fails and from the web console you can schedule regular backups.

We began performance testing over Gigabit Ethernet using a Broadberry dual X5560 rack server running Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit. The Iometer utility reported a fast raw read speed 110MB/s for a mapped Windows share whilst drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip returned read and write speeds of 108MB/s. Using the FileZilla client to FTP the video clip also returned the same speeds.

For 10-Gigabit Ethernet testing we moved over to a dual Opteron 4170 HE Dell PowerEdge R515 fitted with a single port Intel 10GBase-SR card. With a direct fibre connection to the appliance we saw Iometer return a storming raw read speed of 680MB/s for a mapped share.

This translated to a massive boost for drag and drop copies with the same tests now returning average read and write speeds of around 470MB/s. Most businesses will more than likely connect the appliance to a switch over 10-Gigabit and use it to link multiple servers over Gigabit and we can confirm that the N16000 is quite capable of handling these demands.