I’m a glutton for storage. Once I decided to digitize my Blu-ray collection and stream movies wirelessly to a theater room, 40GB chunks of space quickly chiseled away at the four 1TB hard drives populating my Thecus N5200 (1TB had already been lost to parity information, and a second terabyte was allocated to iSCSI SAN duties for my workstation). Thus, it became necessary to find a more serious storage server.
Enter The Beast
Now, I’m a little different from most in that I have a Belkin 24U rack in the garage, so it’s fairly easy to add some serious capacity to the network if it’s needed. Most homes aren’t equipped to accommodate rackmount equipment—many SMBs aren’t even set up with racks in dedicated server rooms. And so, the equipment I turned to for this little project isn’t really intended for the home user. You can take it there if you have the infrastructure, of course. But businesses with rack space will be the ones who will likely be interested in the Thecus N8800 I ended up having sent out to look at.
This thing is a substantial piece of hardware, to be sure. It populates 2U of rack space and offers eight 3.5” drive bays compatible with SATA disks. Thecus does sell a SAS-ready version of the enclosure, but it costs a bit more and is only really necessary if you plan to employ SAS storage and need dual DoMs (Disk on Modules).
Up front, you’ll find a thumbscrew-secured mesh, which covers the eight 3.5” hot-swappable drive bays, an LCD readout, menu navigation buttons, a power switch, and a pair of USB 2.0 ports. Around back, you’ll first notice the twin 350W power supplies—a suggestion that the N8800 has enterprise-class underpinnings (though the fact that we’re using SATA hard drives here undermines that a bit). You’ll also find an additional two USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet jacks, and two full-sized expansion brackets that correspond to a couple of PCI Express x1 slots inside the chassis. Despite this, nothing on Thecus' site suggests that there are upgrades compatible with the N8800, so we'll ignore those expansion slots for now.
A Solid Hardware Foundation
The hardware infrastructure on which Thecus builds the N8800 is decidedly Intel-based. There’s a Celeron M processor, 1GB of DDR2-667 memory, and a pair of Intel Gigabit Ethernet controllers. Plus, you'll find two Marvell four-port storage controllers.
A riser card in the proprietary motherboard enables eight SATA ports from the Marvell chips. Each drive gets its own port, rather than sharing throughput via a port multiplier on a mid-plane.
Everything about the N8800’s construction exudes quality. The four 80mm Sunon fans blowing air through the 2U enclosure are easily serviceable. Cable routing isn’t meticulous, as you might expect from a storage server that doesn’t utilize a mid-plane, and instead runs every SATA cable from controller to drive (likewise for power). The steel enclosure is solid (albeit heavy as a result) and well-braced against flexing. The fitment of all eight drive bays is precise, and the removable carriages slide into place with a secure click.
Configuration
Setting the N8800 up was fairly simply—after all, I had already been using the N5200 for more than a year. It was simply a matter of dropping in eight drives, connecting the bundled patch cable to the WAN port, and attaching both power cords (you need to used both power supplies, else the system’s alarm sounds). Power up, hit the device’s default IP, and start configuring the configuration utility, which resides on a motherboard-down DoM.
The old user interface
The new AJAX interface
The interface of the config app was initially the same as the one used on Thecus’ N5200—a fact that we’ve seen some users complain about (personally, I thought it was easy to navigate and manipulate). However, there was recently an update published that phased in a new AJAX interface. It’ll take some getting used to, but its hierarchical layout is logical enough, and performance of the UI is reasonable.
Without question, this isn’t a piece of equipment you’re going to want to have running in an office environment. While it’s a good deal quieter than most of the rackmount servers I’ve ever heard, the N8800 still cranks out 54.5 decibels from three feet away, head-on. In contrast, the N5200 (armed with four 1TB drives at the same distance) generates 45.4 decibels.
Rubber, Meet Road
We’ve established that home users probably won’t be using this unit. We’ve established that you probably don’t want it running anywhere people who can hear actually need to get work done. This thing had better be full of features and fast, right?
Fortunately, it is on both accounts. I was able to write 4.86GB of benchmark folders from the N8800 to my Core i7-based workstation in 1:27. The same operation took 2:05 with the Thecus N5200 (as a brief refresher, the N5200 only has a 600 MHz Celeron M and 256MB of DDR memory backing it—it’s comparatively much less powerful).
The appliance’s list of features reads like a compilation of business must-haves: Wake on LAN, UPS monitoring, build-in backup, scalability out to additional units, RAID 0/1/5/6/10 support, auto-rebuild, hot-swap, hot-spare, programmable spin-down for power savings, load balancing, link fail-over—to be honest, most of this is overkill for my application, and really needs to be used in an environment with more than two or three users (twenty or thirty would be a better starting point, I imagine).
However, at the end of the day, the 55+ MB/s I’m able to get out of Thecus’ N8800 is more than ample for streaming multiple Blu-ray quality movies around the house (in comparison, the N5200’s RAID 5 array was good for just under 40 MB/s). And with eight drive bays (plus the option to stack additional units), I think I’m taken care of for capacity, too.



