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Thecus 4100+ - NAS shipping defected in and out

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Sat, 08/04/2007 - 11:54 — Christoph C. Cemper

The Thecus NAS server N4100+ is announced as the “original 4-bay NAS solution completely revamped”, and after using a N5200 for the office we got a N4100+ as a second, “smaller” NAS box, as we didn’t have requirements for the RAID6 on that one.

Instead we ordered four 750 GB SATA2 Seagate drives to be installed in this case.

For a product price of EUR 599 ( almost 800 bush bucks) we got

  • a shrink wrapped device with a CD that was EMPTY. If you recently bought hardware you know that not even printed manuals are shipped with most hardware… and of course the CD contains setup software and module … it took the distributor FOUR days and multiple phonecalls to the sale manager, RMA tech, etc from my colleague Tom and me to get that damn CD

  • after setting it up finally (and 12+ hours of formatting of the RAID5) we had a NAS box on a GigabitLAN that did 2-3 Mbit

Yes, around 3-4 Megabit per second read/write to latest Disk Array hardware that’s even “completely revamped”

Also others have carefully asked about the “performance” of 5 Mbit/sec…

Now I don’t know about the network infrastructure in Taiwan where THECUS is originated and built this device with their

Tecus wrote:

decades of R&D expertise, sales channel development, and a strong customer focus to deliver high-quality products that meet the storage needs of individuals and large organizations alike.

But even our small office here in Vienna has a 12 Mbit broadband.

So my internet connection is THREE TIMES faster than the “completely revamped” local storage solution?

Are you nuts Thecus?

Luckily I know this MUST be a defect as we got the N5200 device here for months as comparison.

We can do 60-70 mbit/sec to the N5200, with similar disks,

which is absolute proof that the N4100+ is defect by design – or at least by shipment.

As it seems to me today, this N4100+ model is the biggest waste of money one could imagine and I really hope Thecus will be delivering a

Bios Flash in the next 48 hours, else I’ll send this back to the distributor to get our money back

What’s worse is that

  • the shrink wrapped box contained a CD that was empty, so we had to wait 4 full days to setup the box finally…
  • the homepage of Thecus does NOT contain any bios updates, FAQs or “tricks” to unlock this network brake
  • this sluggish performance even effects your LAN as the SMB share detection is extremely slowed down

  • the CPU display of the N4100 shows 100% when copying some media files to it…

100% CPU for calculating the RAID5 checksums of ONE file being transfered from ONE user?

Now that has nothing to do with needs of individuals and large organizations alike.

This just smells “scam” and I urge you to refrain from ordering this crap just to RMA it back.

Update: Thecus wrote back to my complains

Thecus support wrote:
Thank you for purchased Thecus products!!

The N4100+ is used gigabit chip, but the network throughput performance is

affect by system IO, the N4100+ is a embedded system used Intel Xscale

technology; the IO performance is not like PC based system, that’s why the

network throughput performance is not like PC and N5200. (Oh My God!!)

Generally, the transfer rate is around 24Mbps ~ 80Mbps [haha – a 1/10th of this],

it’s depend on the file type, if transfer large number of small files, which will be slower, if

transfer large single file, which will be faster, but if your switch and PC

NIC support Jumbo Frame, it might improve more 10% ~ 20% network

performances.

But our engineer is looking for another way to improve N4100+‘s perforemance in RAID 5.

So, if we are lucky [you mean, if your clients are lucky], we will find out the solution and release the new FW in early Sep.

And this FW will for sure improvie the performance in RAID5 . ( both READ and WRITE speed)

If you were concerned for the N4100+ performance issue,

we will suggest you should purchase N5200 series.

So Thecus frankly says, that if you are looking for a NAS box that performs, you should NOT buy the 4100+

because only if one is lucky he might get a bit of performance out of it end of September… what a joke!

BTW – the “Disk Imaging Software” announced neither was on the CD for this product, so again this is “announcement ware”

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Comments

Sun, 08/05/2007 - 17:37 — Visitor (not verified)

http://www.engadget.com/2007/

http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/03/qnap-intros-well-specd-ts-209-nas-ser... Is there nobody sell QNAP's NAS in your country ??

Sun, 08/05/2007 - 19:44 — Christoph C. Cemper
Christoph C. Cemper's picture

why QNAP?

Why would you suggest QNAP?

that small device seems to be of even lower quality, as it only supports RAID1 level while we need RAID5

and while Thecus is already a niche product company, I never even heard of QNAP before... what do they do except mini-raid nas boxes for home users as the one you mentioned?

Mon, 08/06/2007 - 12:33 — Christoph C. Cemper
Christoph C. Cemper's picture

update from Thecus

Thecus got back and tells me frankly

If you were concerned for the N4100+ performance issue,
we will suggest you should purchase N5200 series.

(I already own a N5200, so I know they are right!)

Sun, 08/19/2007 - 23:58 — Christoph C. Cemper
Christoph C. Cemper's picture

fyi, we sent that crap back

fyi, we sent that crap back to Thecus and got a second N5200 which DOES perform at almost 200mbit/sec - vs that sleepy N4100 that's worth the extra 150 EUR

Sat, 09/01/2007 - 20:51 — Visitor (not verified)

bits != bytes

"So my internet connection is THREE TIMES faster"

hahaha are you kidding me? Learn the difference between bits and bytes before you try talking about "bad performance."

Mon, 09/03/2007 - 10:15 — Christoph C. Cemper
Christoph C. Cemper's picture

Dear anonymous

Dear anonymous visitor,

Please re-read what you laughed about.

the NAS box made a mere 4Mbit/sec transfer
our Internet Connection has 12Mbit/sec transfer

so my internet connection IS three TIMES faster, as when it comes

to recommendation of things to learn, I suggest for you to first do that
for reading, because the whole post did not state "byte" anywhere.

Christoph

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