Thecus N0503 NAS

Does anyone own the Thecus N0503 NAS product? I'm considering this unit for various reasons (VMWare ESXi, personal backups, etc), and this seems to deliver the most bang for the buck. I really wanted the Drobo, but they just released new units, and they STILL don't come with a network port. Thoughts?

http://www.thecus.com.tw/products_over.php...12&pid=179#

I'm not sure what model, but my brother has a Thecus. He seems to really like it. The only issue he had was the network speed was bad. However, I made him some new ethernet cables and that helped get him in the gigabit realm. The last thing I heard about it, he switched his OS to Windows 7 and said that seemed to increase his speed significantly. So, maybe it's happier with the TCP/IP stack in Windows 7??

Personally I was going to just build my own. Put freenas or WHS on it.

--Dan

I would build it myself using OpenFiler or FreeNAS, but not sure what hardware (case and cpu mostly) I would use. I also want low power consumption, so reusing my old P3 / AMD T-bird machines is not an option.

Have you looked at the Synology BYOD NAS boxes? Tom's Hardware ranks them pretty high. Good supporting software and applications. I've had a DS-207+ for a couple of years and bought a DS-209+ a few months back. Both work well and have been trouble-free.

Ira

$75 Mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813121383
Intel BOXD945GCLF2D Intel Atom processor 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Retail
Dual Core HT 1.6Ghz
2 onboard SATA ( probably can do RAID 0 ), one IDE, one PCI, onboard everything else

$110 HD rack http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16817994028
ICY DOCK MB455SPF-B Multi-Bay Backplane Module - Retail
Holds 5 Drives

$100 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822148337
Seagate 1.5TB 7200 RPM (I like it for performance, and running WHS, the drives will spin down for power savings)

$3 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16812226006
SATA to ESATA connector...5 connectors go to the Docking bay, that leaves one spare, so put it out of the box for future upgrade

$43 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820145180
2GB Corsair ram - I like this brand, and whenever I make a new machine, I always get NEW RAM
just to make sure that something laying around isn't what's causing any instability issues

$40 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16816124028
SYBA SY-PCI40010 PCI SATA II Controller Card - Retail
4 PORT SATA II, plus there is a reviewer that stated he is using this card with WHS with the same MOBO above

$free case - whatever I had laying around, already had a PS in it, rated 500W with the 80% rating

$100 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...6-550-_-Product
Windows Home Server

----------------------

$871 for 7.5TB server, with WHS, Gigabit, Dual core with HT.

to match what MOST of the systems have been listing, take out $400 in drives (I see most are 1.5TB).

If you REALLY wanted to get the "neat" LCD screen that the Thecus has:
http://www.mini-box.com/picoLCD-256x64-OEM

You could swap those drives for lower power drives...but in my opinion, when you want access to them, you want them running full speed, and as these are NOT in real hardware RAID (use FreeNAS's ZFS Redundant file system, or WHS's redundent file system), your speed is whatever one drive can sustain.
[added]

You could also run Ubuntu with a few addons. Apparently it's a pretty decent OS to use for NAS
http://smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30573/77/

This of course, saves you $100 from the "purchase / build" price

[/added]

You could also add in a cheapy IDE drive (new or used, not included in the price on purpose, as I'm sure we all have a few 20-60GB drives laying around doing nothing) as the system drive (recommended so the SATA is just for the storage pool), OR I even contemplated something like this for the ultimate in low power (I'm worried it might affect performance):

$31 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...p;Tpk=TS8GCF133
Transcend 8GB Compact Flash (CF) Flash Card Model TS8GCF133 - Retail

with a $5 IDE to CF adapter card:
-- they are out there, couldn't find a link rather quickly... but it should be $5-$30ish

with 8GB, I'm hoping it's enough for the OS, otherwise I think you can get them upwards of 32GB.
I'm not sure if that card is fast enough, but it was something to get a rough price...there are 255x and 300x cards, something that is like that, which is FAST should allow one to install the OS and some basic software...this way your always spinning drive is using a couple of watts...where as the other drives can be power hungry, as they will sleep when not needed. I also like this method, as backing up the system is almost as easy as pulling the card and using a card reader to read it and image it.

Has room for 2 more USB drives (or a USB HUB and multiple drives) and one ESATA drive. If you hook the ESATA cable to the onboard SATA port, you can hook up a port replicator and get another (4 x 4) 16 drives in this thing.

Lets say you are still using the 1.5TB drives, then that's another 24TB in space. 32TB if you do 2TB drives.

I did some more research, and considered building my own for a while, but I think I would rather have an off the shelf solution. I narrowed it down to the Thecus N0503 NAS and the Synology DS409. I like the DS409 better (4 vs 3 regular hard drives), but I found some conflicting information whether it supports iSCSI or not, and how well it works with VMWare ESXi.

Dan, I have a Thecus N5200 Pro which has been running flawlessly for almost 2 years. I have it holding 5 x 500GB drives in RAID 5 (500 GB drives were the largest reasonably priced drives I could get back then, and there were some power issues with larger drvies which have since been resolved)>

It's a great piece of hardware. I use it to back up everything plus I have it running SqueezCenter to stream music to my 9 Squeezeboxes (plus to my PC at work).

It was pricey, and I could have built something similair for about the same (I'm sure RAID cards are less now), but I wanted something that I could set and forget.

If it weren't forr power-outages that exceed my UPS capacity and the occasional update of SqueezeCenter software, I bet that I would NOT have had to restart it since I got it - it is increadibly stable. Here, I've attached a screencap of it's uptime screen as proof...

Small Update to my post.

Found a good article explaining that Ubuntu has some good "NAS" abilities (with two addons).

http://smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30573/77/

--Dan