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Review: Thecus N5500 five-bay enterprise NAS and DAS. Worth £575?

by Tarinder Sandhu on 4 September 2009, 05:00 3.45

Tags: Thecus N5500, Thecus (4978.TWO)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qatpy

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Performance results

IOMeter 64KB sequential read
QNAP TS-509 Pro (dual Gigabit)Thecus N5500 (dual Gigabit)Thecus N5500 (single Gigabit)
105.4644.89103.96
QNAP TS-509 Pro (dual Gigabit)
Thecus N5500 (dual Gigabit)
Thecus N5500 (single Gigabit)
0
20
40
60
80
100
120


Using a 1GB test file and evaluated via the 64KB sequential read test, the N5500's performance is less than half the similarly-specified QNAP TS-509 Pro when run via dual-Gigabit, suggesting sub-optimal firmware. The single-Gigabit speed is much better, clearly. Neither NAS appliance is able to breach the single-Gigabit speed barrier of 125MB/s.

IOMeter 64KB sequential write
QNAP TS-509 Pro (dual Gigabit)Thecus N5500 (dual Gigabit)Thecus N5500 (single Gigabit)
70.2357.5693.89
QNAP TS-509 Pro (dual Gigabit)
Thecus N5500 (dual Gigabit)
Thecus N5500 (single Gigabit)
0
20
40
60
80
100


Sequential writing speed continues to be better on the single connection, although 57.6MB/s can be deemed as reasonable throughput.

IOMeter 64KB random read and write
QNAP TS-509 Pro (dual Gigabit)Thecus N5500 (dual Gigabit)Thecus N5500 (single Gigabit)
12.2719.3820.78
QNAP TS-509 Pro (dual Gigabit)
Thecus N5500 (dual Gigabit)
Thecus N5500 (single Gigabit)
0
5
10
15
20
25


Hitting the NAS boxes some, randomised reading and writing is comparatively good on the N5500.

IOMeter 1MB sequential read
QNAP TS-509 Pro (dual Gigabit)Thecus N5500 (dual Gigabit)Thecus N5500 (single Gigabit)
41.5444.1439.85
QNAP TS-509 Pro (dual Gigabit)
Thecus N5500 (dual Gigabit)
Thecus N5500 (single Gigabit)
0
10
20
30
40
50


As is the 1MB transfer test.

FTP speed

Hooking the N5500 up to a high-end Core i7 test rig via (single) Gigabit Ethernet and FTP, we managed a download speed of 19.2MB/s and upload of 35.1MB/s when transferring a 5.25GB file to and from the host computer. The results are a little lower than we'd hope for, especially from a high-end NAS.