Marti's blog

Raw HD video takes a lot of space, and of course you want to keep a backup of everything, which immediately doubles your space requirements. I had been relying on an old PC running FreeNAS with 1 Tb of redundant storage (3x500 Gb with RAID5) but as it was filling up, I started looking for a more convenient, more energy efficient NAS that would handle a bunch of new hard-drives. I settled down on the newer Thecus N0503 : it's powerful with an Atom CPU, 1 Gb of RAM and dual Gigabit ports, and it's also quite affordable (about 360 € including VAT).

The hardware

I ran into a problem as the first unit I received was damaged. The sort of damage that probably happened during manufacturing, as the packaging was intact and showed no sign of mishandling, and also as the damage was on the front end behind the protective door. I got a second one that turned out fine however.

The N0503 is special in the sense that it can receive either 5 2½ disks, or 3 3½ disks. I'm not sure why would anyone bother with 2½ disks in a NAS as they are more expensive and of smaller capacity. I decided to install 3x1,5 Tb Samsung drives, for a decent 2,8 Tb formatted RAID5 storage. Installation was easy, each drive is put between two rails before being slided inside the box.
While the front door feels plasticky, the box itself is a nice solid block of aluminum that looks quite sturdy.

Notable ports include dual Gigabit, 2 USB ports, 1 e-SATA and an internal expansion slot. My main regret with the hardware, besides not having 2 more slots for 31/2 drives, is that the power supply is an external brick with a custom connector: an internal one would have reduced the cable clutter. There's a free ethernet cable provided.

The features

The N0503 comes loaded with features: of course there's the regular RAID modes, file sharing (SMB, NFS, AFS, FTP, etc.), Web, DNLA, iSCSI, print and iTunes server, user access control with quotas, etc. but you also find less common features such as whole disk encryption (using a USB key to store the encryption key), Gigabit port aggregation for extra throughput or the ZFS file system. Best of all is that it comes with an integrated module manager that lets users add extra modules, making it easily extensible.

The software

Let's get to the point: I'm afraid the software just doesn't feel as well done as the hardware. The device is managed through a Web interface that use AJAX to be more responsive, however it is not very well written, looks half finished and is sometimes downright not functional. Worse, it seems that some of the files used for the interface (scripts, stylesheets) are missing as the browser tries to download them only to get a 404 Error from the NAS. There aren't a lot of options, which will please beginners but frustrate more advanced users.

The paper documentation included is minimal and you'll have to look for the CD or online to get it on PDF. I was disappointed to find out it is written in a very approximative English that is sometimes hard understand. Thankfully the interface isn't very complicated, but some options remain mysterious.

Performance

I have no Gigabit network so my measurements won't be very useful. Without encryption the Ethernet interface is maxed out at 11 Mb/s, I have no idea how far it would go with a proper connection. I tried with encryption and speed dropped to about 5 Mb on writing and 7 Mb on reading.

Issues

Sadly I ran into issues transferring large files from Windows 7 over Wifi (even though I have excellent signal). Sometimes the transfer would fail, and from then on all write access would stall and not get anywhere until the NAS is restarted. No problem using Ethernet however.

Other smaller issues included fan and temperature buttons that don't show any temperature or fan info, Internet time synchronization that doesn't adjust to the right timezone, Media server serving the files without any sorting (annoying when you have hundreds of files to go through) and not recognizing MP4 videos, the USB copy function that is supposed to copy the content of the USB drive on the front port but actually works with the back port, etc. All in all a lot of little annoying issues that could and should have been corrected given how easy it is to find them.

Conclusion

All in all the N0503 still manages to do its job, and its a great piece of hardware for the price. It is however hard for me to recommend it right now given the current state of the software it runs. The comparison to FreeNAS is painful: while being developped as a free hobby project by mostly one or two people, it still manages to offer a similar set of features while feeling a lot more a lot more polished.

NAS (networked storage servers) can cost a real bundle. In fact anything that can take more than two hard drives tend to be in the 500 € (about the same in dollars), if not more for something with a nice embedded software. And that is without counting the drives of course. Well I still needed to store some datas over a network and after some searches found what must be the cheapest possible NAS: 25 €! Here's how it breaks down:

• 1 old PC a in tower case (Pentium III with 256 Mb): 0 €
• 1 CompactFlash card, 256 Mb: 0 € (got it free with a coupon that came with my camera, but it's too small to use for taking picture)
• 1 CompactFlash to IDE adapter: 15 €
• 1 Serial-ATA controller: 10 € (30 €, but got a 20 € coupon for it, optional if you don't mind using IDE drives)
• FreeNAS, open-source: 0 €

As you can see, the whole trick is reusing old stuff and FreeNAS, which is a neat embedded FreeBSD distribution aimed at building NAS. Installation was very easy and did not require any Unix knowledge: just burn the ISO on a CD and boot it. From there you can either keep using the CD to boot and store the settings on a USB key (automatically detected), or do a full install over either a disk partition, a USB key (if you can boot over USB, but most old PC can't) or as I did, some flash memory installed as an IDE drive. All you have to set up is the initial IP configuration, everything else is done through a nice and user friendly Web interface.

As far as features go, it's got everything you expect a good NAS to have and even more, including SMB, FTP, NFS, RSync, AFP, RAID (0,1 & 5), UPnP, iSCSI, filesystem support, etc. The beauty of FreeNAS is that you can opt for software RAID, and it uses a standard FreeBSD system underneath. As such, you have much more freedom in building a RAID array or moving drives from one system to another (a new FreeNAS system will be able to access the content of RAID drives from a different installation and controller).

The downside is that FreeNAS is still beta, and although it works (for me anyway) it's very much a work in progress right now. Some might feel uncomfortable having their valuable data handled by such beta software.