Thecus has had quite a few notable achievements with its NAS appliances as it was first to offer IP SAN support along with five- and seven-bay desktop systems. [IMG 79150/]

It goes one step further as its new N8800 SAS - kindly supplied by Origin Storage (0844 288 6868) - is the first SMB NAS appliance to deliver support for both SATA and SAS hard disks.

Deployed as a 2U rack chassis, the N8800 SAS is an eight-bay appliance that has a solid look to its construction. The drives fit in lockable hot-swap carriers and the whole lot can be protected with a flip-up grill. A backlit LCD panel plumb in the centre provides plenty of useful information about the status of arrays, drives, the network ports and IP addresses and the control pad alongside can be used for manual configuration.

Fault tolerance is good as along with plenty of RAID array choices you have two hot-plug power supplies and the pair of Gigabit ports can be linked into load balanced or failover teams. You also get the benefit of Thecus’ dual-DOM, which we first saw in our review of the N5500. This aims to provide OS fault tolerance by using a pair of 128MB IDE micro disk modules.

These are stacked on top of each other with the lower one plugged directly into the motherboard IDE interface. If one fails the other takes over but it is designed purely to get the appliance back up and ensure the storage remains accessible in an emergency. You can’t interact with it as the secondary DOM is read-only so won’t have any of your custom settings on it.

The N8800 SAS offers a top specification as it sports a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo processor partnered by 4GB of DDR2 memory. You have pairs of USB ports fore and aft and an eSATA port as well. You can ignore the two PCI-Express expansion slots on the motherboard as Thecus still hasn’t decided what to do with them yet.



Installation won’t take long as the bundled Setup Wizard searches the network for the appliance and provides quick access to the main web interface. Thecus has followed the lead taken by Synology and Qnap and has also updated its firmware with a new Ajax-based interface.

Your first job is to create RAID arrays and for testing we called up a quartet of 146GB Fujitsu SAS drives. We configured them as a RAID-5 array, which only took an hour to build. If you want iSCSI targets make sure you keep enough space aside for them as this cannot be modified once the array has been built. Targets are simple to create as you decide on the size of the target, provide a name that’s appended to the IQN and enable it.

The new Ajax-based web interface is a big improvement and Thecus offers plenty of RAID array choices.

Think carefully about file systems as although EXT3, XFS and ZFS are supported there are some caveats. If you want volume snapshots then go for ZFS but bear in mind that this file system can only be accessed over CIFS/SMB. If you choose XFS for its journaling then you won’t be able to apply folder quotas.

If you want iSCSI targets make sure you set aside some space for them during array creation.

The appliance supports Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac systems and offers FTP services, whilst access security extends to a local user database plus AD authentication. We had no problems adding the appliance to our AD domain where a new computer object was automatically created on our Windows Server 2003 R2 domain controller.

The appliance supports Active Directory authentication and worked fine with our AD domain controller..

Extra features can be added by downloading and installing modules from the Thecus support site but the Download Manager is the only one currently available for the N8800 SAS. With this in place we could retrieve remote files using BitTorrent, HTTP, FTP or eMule.

Backup features are reasonable as Thecus has ditched the hopelessly inadequate Backup Utility and replaced it with FarStone’s DriveClone Pro. This is far superior as it can secure selected files and folders on workstations at scheduled intervals, has a snapshot service for disaster recovery and offers drive and partition cloning as well. You can also use Thecus’ Nsync for copying data from one appliance to another.



For performance testing we called up a Dell PowerEdge R410 server equipped with dual 2.13GHz L5506 Xeons, 6GB of DDR3 memory and running Windows Server 2008. Dragging and dropping copies of a 2.52GB video clip delivered superb results, with the appliance returning read and write speeds of 99MB/sec and 92MB/sec.

FTP transfers were even better with the FileZilla utility reporting speeds of 103MB/sec and 95MB/sec with the same test file. Thecus didn’t disappoint with IP SAN speeds either with the Iometer utility reporting a 108MB/sec raw read throughput for a single 50GB target.

iSCSI targets can be created swiftly where you provide a unique name to add to their IQN and decide on their size.

We then configured the two Gigabit ports as an 802.3ad aggregated link to test adapter teaming. Our HP ProCurve 2848 switch supports dynamic LACP (link aggregation control protocol) so as soon as it saw the team it created a high-speed trunk for them.

Along with the Dell R410 we used an IBM System x3650 M2 equipped with dual 2.53GHz E5540 Xeons, 10GB of DDR3 memory and also running Windows Server 2008. We logged each server onto dedicated iSCSI targets and ran Iometer on both of them. After allowing them to settle down we saw a cumulative read speed of 108MB/sec showing that adapter teaming had no impact on performance.

Thecus Nsync allows data from one appliance to be copied across to another.

The N8800 SAS is undoubtedly the fastest SMB NAS appliance we’ve seen so far and delivers extremely good results for file sharing activities. Fault tolerance is in abundance and with eight hot-swap drives to play with the appliance offers a high storage capacity.

Author: Dave Mitchell

Thecus N8800 SAS review