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NAS Attack: Network Storage From Thecus And Western Digital
By , Patrick Schmid,
1. Attractive New NAS Options

Network-attached storage (what we commonly refer to as NAS) is probably the easiest way to make data easily accessible in a connected environment, as it facilitates the exchange of files and eliminates redundant storage. It often also introduces additional network features, as most NAS boxes aren’t just simple storage devices anymore.

Thecus believes that NAS devices powered by small and quiet 2.5” hard drives make the most sense, and Western Digital sent us its latest high-capacity NAS product for review.

Network Storage for All

The market for NAS devices has undergone a similar fragmentation as the hard drive market, as there are devices for consumers, prosumers, and small business applications. Simple NAS devices utilize a single hard drive, while more versatile and powerful boxes utilize at least two drives, adding a redundancy option through RAID 1. Professional NAS solutions are typically RAID 5-capable and support between four and eight hard drives, enabling high-capacity storage as well as a comforting degree of data safety.

We received Western Digital’s MyBook World Edition II, which is based on RAID 0 or RAID 1 and two 2TB 3.5” WD Caviar Green hard drives. The second candidate in this review is the Thecus N0204, a BYOD-type product (build your own device), meaning that you can use two 2.5” SATA drives of your choice. There are few similarities between this pair, apart from the fact that both are NAS devices.

High Capacity by WD, Small Dimensions by Thecus

The MyBook World Edition II offers significant storage capacity starting at around $500 (for the 4TB model), offering a dual drive 3.5” solution. Thecus instead focused on reducing the physical footprint of external storage with its miniNAS N0204. The enclosure starts at roughly $150, but you still have to add two drives, which will effectively take you to $250-400. You’ll find detailed product information, feature discussion and performance evaluation on the following pages.

2. Western Digital MyBook World Edition II

Western Digital has been relying on the MyBook design for a few years now, and the MyBook World Edition II follows suit. Since there are two (instead of only one) hard drives inside the “book,” it is wider than many other MyBook products. The front panel sports only a small status LED; all other control elements and interfaces are located on the rear of the device.

Interfaces

There you will find a gigabit networking port, a USB 2.0 port, and the power switch, along with the jack for the external power supply and a reset switch. However, you need an object like a paper clip to operate the small switch.

Exchanging the Hard Drives

Since two drives populate the storage device, WD supports either RAID 0, RAID 1, or JBOD modes (just a bunch of disks). You’d expect the drive to be sealed off to prevent users from removing or exchanging the hard drives, but we were pleasantly surprised by the easily-accessible internals. You are definitely able to exchange hard drives yourself, should you want to. All you need to do is open the top cover of the MyBook World Edition II and remove the metal plate by unfastening a single screw. This plate is used as a lock for the drives. Once removed, you may pull the plastic straps that were installed to facilitate removal of the drives. We particularly liked that you don’t need tools other than a screw driver.

Huge Capacity

WD offers 2TB and 4TB versions of its MyBook World Edition II. As expected, both utilize Western Digital hard drives. Our 4TB test sample was powered by two WD20EADS Green drives. These are based on a four-platter design and they work at a 5,400 RPM spindle speed. NCQ, 32MB of data cahe, and a SATA/300 interface support balanced performance, which is definitely fast enough for NAS applications.

3. Thecus N0204

Thecus’s N0204 is a small NAS device, which you should be able to place almost anywhere. Its dimensions of 88x63x133mm are anything but intrusive, and should allow for the device to reside in public places like your living room, if you have a use for networked storage there.

Since the NAS box is based on 2.5” hard drives, it is much smaller than other comparable products. As a result, there wasn’t any room left inside the device for a fan. Even still, Thecus wanted to be on the safe side in regard to ventilation, and simply integrated a fan with the included stand.

In addition to the interfaces and control elements we found on the WD MyBook World Edition II (USB 2.0, LEDs), Thecus also offers a USB copy button, used to transfer the contents of a USB 2.0 storage device onto the N0204.

Interfaces

The gigabit networking interface is also located on the rear side of the device, in addition to a second USB port, the power supply jack, and the power button. The rear section also serves as the access point to the hard drives. However, we recommend avoiding the rear USB port, as its implementation is limited to USB 1.1 transfer rates, and hence only 12 Mbit/s.

Free Hard Drive Selection

Thecus does not ship the N0204 with hard drives, giving you free choice to select the hard drive type and capacity. Our 2.5” hard drive charts are a useful guide to hard drive selection for the Thecus N0204.

Removable Frames for HDDs

The maximum capacity for this NAS device is currently reached if two brand new 640GB 2.5” drives are installed, yielding nearly 1.3TB. But these drives are still fairly hard to come by, which means that 1TB distributed across two 500GB drives should be a more attainable balance between cost, capacity, and availability. The 750GB and 1TB 2.5” drives announced by WD will be based on 12.5mm designs, meaning that they might not fit into this Thecus NAS.

Hard drives have to be installed into removable frames, which are made of metal and plastic. Their finish is nice and the only exception to the great impression is the stand, which you should not snap on with too much pressure.

4. Administration And Web-Based Front End

MyBook World Edition II: An Intuitive Administration Console

WD’s NAS product is ready to run as soon as you plug a network cable into your switch. The device automatically obtains an IP address through DHCP, which has to be available on your local network. Once the address is assigned, you can start configuring the device via a Web b-based interface and any Internet browser. The MyBook World Edition II is a consumer device, hence the design and structure of the interface is intuitive and simple.

Large buttons show you the way to the most important settings and options; their titles are self-explanatory. WD did not forget to add a comprehensive online help feature, which is locally available, rather than requiring Internet access.

Advanced Features Included

You can switch the management interface into the advanced mode as well, which offers more feature options. Here you can configure the RAID mode, but also software features, such as enabling the integrated Twonky Media Server or the iTunes server feature. Management options, like file sharing settings, are more comprehensive in advanced mode, as it is now possible to create user groups and configure each of your shares for use with CIFS, NFS, AFP, and FTP separately.

The device also supports a rather comprehensive logging feature and email notification. You can also have the MyBook World Edition II generate an SSL certificate, allowing you to access the device via https in a secure manner. And lastly, even technical users will not be disappointed, as you can also enable an SSH login. Power users with a Unix background will probably prefer this, as the Web interface does not load as quickly as it could, and does still have noticeable delays. This, however, is the case with most consumer-level NAS boxes we’ve seen.

Thecus N0204: Initial Setup Through a Setup Tool

Thecus has a different approach for setting up the N0204, as you need the Thecus Setup Wizard for the initial configuration of the NAS device. It is available for Mac OS X and for Windows. It takes care of installing the entire operating environment onto the N0204, as well as making all necessary settings, such as creating shares. Once the initial setup is complete, all other settings and options can be made through a Web interface. However, you can only change the RAID mode through the Thecus tool.

Comprehensive Configuration Tool

The Web-based interface is less intuitive than WD’s, but its advantage is a structural approach in menus that are sorted by configuration topics. Users who already administered a Thecus device before will immediately know where and how to get things done, as the key options like user management, share management, or email notification are similar on different Thecus NAS devices. The features and complexity are similar than on the Western Digital device.

Although the Thecus interface isn’t as chic as WD’s, it comes with a few more options that we consider very interesting. Thecus offers an iTunes server and a Mediabolic Media Server, but additionally includes a webcam server for surveillance and a print server module. Lastly, we also liked that the Thecus device's configuration interface loads faster than the MyBook's.

Many Thecus products can be upgraded by downloading and installing additional feature modules, which you can obtain on the Thecus Web site for free. We didn’t find add-ons for the N0204 at the time we reviewed it, but the note (coming soon) suggests that there’ll be more content in the future.

5. Power Consumption And Test Setup

Power Consumption

Both devices require very acceptable amounts of power. WD’s MyBook consumes only 15W when it runs idle; using the low-power WD20EADS Caviar Green drives at reduced spindle speeds certainly contributed a lot to the low power consumption numbers.

We installed two Seagate Momentus 5400.6 hard drives (ST9500325ASG) into the Thecus N0204. These provide 500GB each, they come with 8MB cache, and a 5.400 RPM spindle speed. Using this configuration, the Thecus NAS device required as little as 6W idle power, which is an amazing result, as it is less than your DSL router might require.

Test Setup

System Hardware 
Platform
Asus P5E3 Deluxe, Rev.1.03G
Intel X38, BIOS: 0810 (02/11/2007)
CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (65 nm Conroe), 2.66 GHz 
RAM 2 x 1024MB Crucial Ballistix DDR3-1600 
eSATA-Controller JMicron JMB363 
System Drive
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9, 160 GB
7.200 U/Min, SATA/300, 8MB cache
Test Hard Drives
2 x 2.5" Seagate Momentus 5400.6, ST9500325ASG
500GB, 5.400 U/Min, SATA/300, 8 MB Cache

2 x 3.5" Western Digital WD20EADS
2TB, 5,400 RPM, SATA/300, 32MB Cache
DVD-ROM Samsung SH-D163A , SATA150 
Graphics CardGigabyte Radeon HD 3850 GV-RX385512H
GPU: 670 MHz
Memory: 512MB DDR3 (830 MHz, 256 Bit)
Network Interface
Marvell Yukon 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller 
AudioIntegrated
Power Supply
CoolerMaster RS-850-EMBA, ATX 12V V2.2, 850 Watt   
System Software & Drivers
Operating System
Windows Vista Enterprise SP1
DirectX 10 DirectX 10 (Vista-Standard)
DirectX 9 Version: April 2007
Graphics Driver
ATI Radeon Version 7.12
Network Drivers
9.0.32.3 (Vista-Standard)
Intel Chipset Drivers
Version 6.9.1.1001 (20/02/2008)
JMicron Drivers
Version 1.17.15.0 (24/03/2007)


We tested both devices using the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit

6. Benchmark Results: Multimedia

Please check out our benchmark gallery for additional results.

Both devices deliver solid performance if you want to record video data onto them. The same applies for playing video, as both devices deliver much better performance than their direct competitors from Maxtor, Synology, or Promise. The advantage is smaller once you start working with small files, such as images.

7. Benchmark Results: Office

Please check out our benchmark gallery for additional results.

Thecus and Western Digital both deliver nice performance when handling office files, such as Excel or Word documents. An average of 18.1 MB/s for Thecus and 17 MB/s for WD in RAID 1 modes are definitely more than enough to work quickly in workgroups or at home. WD was best in restoring backup files at 35 MB/s.

8. Conclusion

Although the two devices follow entirely different concepts, both the Thecus N0204 and Western Digital’s MyBook World Edition II are very solid NAS devices offering decent performance and a plethora of useful features.

Western Digital: Good Looks, Lots of Storage, Enthusiast Features

WD’s MyBook World Edition II looks pretty much like other MyBook products and scores through its design and classy finish. By using a pair of 2TB hard drives, WD is capable of offering a massive 4TB total capacity within the physical dimensions of a dual-drive MyBook. We found the Web-based interface to be very intuitive and easy to operate, as the basic options are reduced to only the most needed configuration settings by default. Enthusiasts may switch into the advanced mode and can consider enabling SSH access though, which provides full control over the Linux-based operating system.

Performance is reasonable, as our benchmarks returned fairly average results; most other NAS devices we've tested in this range are about as-fast. At the same time, power consumption was remarkably low for a dual-drive 3.5” NAS product. Improvements could be made by accelerating page-loading performance on the Web interface and by adding a few more features, such as a print server.

Thecus N0204: The Pocket NAS

The N0204 is small, but powerful nonetheless. We found it particularly interesting to see that this device delivers the same performance as 3.5” NAS devices, but without requiring the same amount of power. In fact, this is the lowest-power NAS device we’ve yet seen, even in a data-protecting RAID 1 arrangement. The only disadvantage may be the limited capacity of 2.5” hard drives, which is about to shift from 500GB to 640GBat the high-end.

Initial setup happens in two steps: first you have to run a Thecus application, which deploys the NAS operating system and basic settings. Then you can administer the N0204 through a Web-based interface, which appears simpler and a bit more technical than the WD software.

The device is attractive enough. But we believe that the use of metal instead of plastic would even be nicer, as not all plastic components, such as the stand, appear to be solid enough. However, you get fast throughput and the amazing idle power of only 6W in exchange.