Thecus N2310 NAS Server Network Storage Review

By Bruce Normann

Manufacturer: Thecus Technology Corp
Product Name: Intelligent NAS
Model Number: N2310
UPC: 884956004004
Price As Tested: $159.00 (Newegg | Amazon)

Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by Thecus.

The Thecus N2310 Network Attached Storage Server is a product that is breaking new ground for the NAS market. Power to the people, NASes for the masses, whatever you want to call it, the N2310 is about driving the cost of NAS ownership down. Thankfully, Thecus recognizes that no one wants a NAS that runs slow, or one that doesn’t have modern features like mobile access. So, the N2310 is all about providing the lowest-cost, technically-acceptable solution. That’s a fine line to tread, and many companies have tripped over themselves trying to do that. Benchmark Reviews has tested quite a few NAS products in the last few years, and we’re in a good position to evaluate how well the Thecus N2310 meets its mission statement.

The Thecus N2310 is aimed right at the typical home user, by virtue of its size and its form factor. With two bays you can have your choice of capacity or redundancy with RAID 0, 1, and JBOD options. Although a two-bay NAS is still a modest choice, the ability to run RAID 1 and get continued access to your data after a drive failure is a huge increase in functionality. At the heart of the N2310’s value proposition is the fact that Thecus has brought a 2-bay NAS to market for the price of a 1-bay device. They didn’t skimp on features and performance to do it, as you you’ll see in the rest of this article. Compromises had to be made for certain, but the overall product doesn’t lack any of the basic characteristics that make up a useful NAS network storage server.

Benchmark Reviews has tested a wide array of NAS products, ranging from the QNAP TS-119 NAS single-disk offering made for home users, to the Goliath QNAP TS-870U-RP 8-Bay NAS for the storage needs of large businesses. Most recently we tested the 4-bay TS-470 which falls in the middle between those two extremes. Let’s see how this 2-bay device compares to those large and mid-sized offerings.

The bottom line with any high performance storage solution is that the number of drive spindles in play is often more important than almost any other factor, assuming that everything else is based on reasonably modern technology. This is the reason more and more people are opting for NAS systems with at least four bays, even though they may not need all that capacity now. But what if you can’t afford all that capacity now, and a 4-bay NAS is out of your price range? If you want to start small, then a two-bay unit fits the bill, and the Thecus N2310 is also one of the lowest cost models in the market.

The Thecus N2310 is a small unit, arranged in a tower format and should fit anywhere in a typical home or aparent setting. The standard model is a diskless unit, and Thecus has a list of compatible hard drives on their website. The size is similar to competitive models: 135mm (H) x 97mm (W) x 207mm (D), and the weight is a bit lower than most, at 1.74 pounds without drives installed. The unit is mostly built from plastic, which is one of the compromises that helps keep the cost down. Each HDD you install will add about 1-1/2 pounds, depending on your choice of drive. Many users will be looking at 2TB and 3TB drives for a unit like this, and they’re heavier than most. There are no handles on the unit, but it wasn’t difficult to pick the whole thing up, even when it was fully loaded.

The front panel of the Thecus N2310 is dominated by the drive bays/trays, but along the right side are a number of indicators and two pushbuttons. Starting from the top, we have the Power LED, which is Solid blue when the system is ready, blinking blue during boot up, and solid red if the system has erred out. Second from the top is the system status LED, which blinks white if the diagnostic mode has kicked in. It is solid white after the diagnostics are complete, and is solid Red if a system error has occurred. I never saw this one light up during my time using the N2310, which is as it should be. The third one down is for HDD #1, and if it’s steady then a HDD is present and powered up, blinking white is for HDD activity, and red means a drive failure. I saw only white during my usage. The fourth indicator works exactly the same, except for HDD #2. The fifth LED indicates LAN connectivity with solid white, and network activity with blinking white. The last indicator is for the USB ports. Solid white means there’s a USB drive present in one of the ports, blinking white indicates USB copy activity, and solid red means there has been a USB copy failure. At the bottom below the indicators, are two pushbuttons for USB Copy and power. The USB copy button copies the USB drive contents to a specified directory on the N2310. It is strictly a one-way copy function; the button cannot be reconfigured for bidirectional copying. The power button is a momentary press to turn the unit on, and you have to hold it down for a few seconds to turn the NAS off. There’s a faint beep to let you know that the unit will start the shutdown process.

There is no front door on the enclosure, and you can access each of the two drive trays directly, with their latching handles. There are no locks on the handles, and my advice is to put the N2310 NAS well away from curious children, and adults for that matter. The NAS is probably safe from most pets, but trust me when I say that you do not want to start accidentally pulling drives out. With only two drives to worry about, and the most likely configuration being RAID 1, which creates two identical data sets on the disks, maybe I’m worrying too much. It wouldn’t be the first time… still, my advice is: don’t tempt fate. The drive bays are not marked on the front bezel, and the individual drive trays aren’t marked either. Drive Bay #1 is on the left, and Bay #2 is on the right, as viewed from the front of the device. You can see some of the LED indicators below, showing what happens when you pull a drive out when the NAS is running. Two red indicators showing error states for HDD #2, and the NAS….

With the unit safely turned off, it’s OK to remove one or more drives and they all slide out the front like this. Each plastic-framed tray holds one individual drive in the N2310, and the HDD is held in place by four screws. The option is there to use the side mounting holes on the HDD, or the bottom ones. The WD Black drives that I use for testing have both sets of mounting holes, but some drives don’t. The screws required for the two options are different, and Thecus provides full sets (+spares) of both. Inserting and removing the drive trays from the NAS was smooth and positive, both with HDDs mounted in the trays and without. The latches acted like a locking lever; once the trays reach the end of their travel, swinging the latch levers down drives the tray firmly into place. It’s a well-designed system for getting the drives in and out, and although the plastic construction is a bit flexible, that actually helps reduce vibration. Any time you have more than one HDD mounted in a common chassis, drive vibrations start to interact and they can get out of hand. Anything that reduces vibration transfer into the chassis can be a really important factor in HDD life. The new trays are undoubtedly cheaper to produce, and yes you can tell by looking at them, but they function just fine and also reduce vibration. That’s a compromise we can all live with, I think.

Around the back of the Thecus N2310, you can see all of the hardwired I/O points. Starting at the top is the small cooling fan, which is held in place with four plastic pins and was reasonably quiet in operation. Along the left edge are two USB jacks; the upper one is a Super Speed spec USB 3.0 version, and the bottom one is a standard USB 2.0 jack. Directly below is the single RJ-45×1: 10/100/1000 BASE-TX connection – the raison d’être for any NAS unit. This one is driven directly from the APM86491 single-core System On a Chip (SoC) that runs almost everything on the N2310 NAS server. A small, recessed Reset switch is located just below the GbE connector, and is accessible with a small diameter pin of some sort, like a paper clip. Below that is the power receptacle, which gets DC power from the 40 watt external PSU that is sourced from leading supplier Channel Well Technologies. Along the right side of the rear panel is the standardized Kensington lock hole. A device this small could get boosted very easily, so the locking device might be a good invesent in some situations.

There are no ventilation holes on the sides of the Thecus N2310 chassis, but two small vents near the front are molded into the top and bottom panels. The primary entry point for cool air is still through the front of the drive trays; where it passes over the HDDs and is then exhausted out the rear of the unit. I didn’t hear any indication that the fan speed is modulated, but it was pretty quiet, anyway. I haven’t paid much attention to fan noise in most of the smaller NAS models I’ve reviewed, as it was never really noticeable during my daily use. The Thecus N2310 continued that pattern, blending in to the background noise of my study, despite having a small diameter cooling fan exhausting out its rear panel. Smaller fans tend to be noisier, or perhaps just more annoying because of their higher pitch, but I never really noticed this one running unless I put my head down on the table. Any time I do that, it means I’m too sleepy to continue working, and a little fan noise isn’t going to make any difference.

The bottom of the Thecus N2310 is a simple affair with four small rubber feet, and a product label with Model and Serial numbers. The feet are pretty low profile, but there was enough room below the edge of the bottom panel, to make it easy to lift the unit up when I needed to move it around. There are two small screws beneath the front two feet, which need to be removed if you want to begin the disassembly process by pulling the front panel out. There aren’t any surprises underneath the rear two feet.

Now that we’ve had a thorough tour of the exterior, let’s do a complete tear-down and see what the insides look like. The next section covers Insider Details.

The insides of these things are always more interesting than the outsides, at least to me. The N2310 comes apart pretty easily, once you crack the code. It wasn’t as hard as cracking open an iPhone, but there’s always some guessing and exploratory prying that has to take place before all the latches let their guard down. There were just two screws on the rear panel, but another two were hidden underneath the front two rubber feet. Once all the screws were out, the front bezel could be removed after popping off a couple internal latches. The one-piece outer shell, which forms the sides and top, then has to slide about 1cm towards the front so it can be lifted off. That’s pretty much it for disassembly, besides removing the controller board and the fan from the rear panel. For the record, it went back together easier than it came apart.

The main controller board takes up the entire right side of the unit, and nearly everything is integrated on the one board, including all the front and back panel connectors, indicators, and switches. The only exception is the backplane where the two SATA connections for the drives are mounted. The main board is held in place by four screws, and was quite easy to remove. The memory backup battery is mounted to the backside of the controller board, and can only be accessed by disassembling the unit to this level.

The main controller board is not that densely populated; the only reason it is this big is so it can span the entire length of the NAS unit, and integrate all the front and rear panel devices onto the PCB. The N2310 uses Applied Micro’s new APM86491 single-core PowerPC processor as the heart of the NAS server. This single IC is truly a System On a Chip (SoC), with everything that a modern NAS needs integrated into one package. Located to the left of the SoC, there is a single 2Gb x8 flash memory module from Micron, to store the system OS. This acts like a system drive, yet it takes up very little space and uses almost no power. Just above that is a single Ethernet PHY transceiver from Realtek. To the right of the SoC is the 512MB of DRAM, contained on two FGBA ICs supplied by Samsung. That’s pretty much it, for active components, besides a number of power supply and regulator circuits spread around on the board. The main controller board and backplane connect with an x1 PCI Express connector located toward the rear of the controller card, near the power and Ethernet connectors. The interface travelling through this connector is pure SATA, coming directly from the APM86491 chip; the PCIe spec connector body is just used for convenience.

There are no provisions for additional cooling of any of the chips on the controller board. I read all the marketing stuff about Applied Micro’s new APM86491 single-core PowerPC processor, and how low the power consumption is. What I didn’t expect, was that the power requirements would be so low that no heat sinking at all would be needed. There’s not even a decent airflow path inside the NAS that passes a lot of air across the front surface of the PCB. The overall performance of the NAS server doesn’t seem to suffer from all this low-power goodness, so just enjoy the fact that modern IC manufacturing can produce this much computing power from such a small amount of electrical power.

So far we’ve had a good look at what there is to observe as far as hardware goes, but let’s dig down one more layer, down to the chip level where the technology really starts to get interesting. I love my shiny hardware just as much as the next person, but it’s only half the story….

The Thecus N2310 NAS server is meant to be a very low cost device, so for the electronics inside that means putting as many functions as possible on one chip. That’s the traditional path for cost reduction, and the reduction in physical size is often a happy afterthought. Consumers may say “Smaller and cheaper”, but the business always says “Cheaper and smaller.” The N2310 uses Applied Micro’s new APM86491 single-core PowerPC processor as the heart of the NAS server. This single IC is truly a System On a Chip (SoC), with everything that a modern NAS needs integrated into one package:

• Single-Core Power 465 processors with a floating-point unit
• 16/32-bit DDR3 SDRAM controller with optional ECC
• Two Gen 2 PCI Express interfaces with x1 operations
• USB 3.0 – 1 Host with integrated PHY, 1 Host & Device with integrated PHY
• Two SATA-II ports
• Two Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbps MAC ports

That covers all the basic necessities, and there are also a few nice-to-haves thrown in:

• Boot support from NAND flash, NOR flash/SD card/serial flash/USB/DRAM
• SLIMPro ARM 32-bit acceleration processor for enhanced hardware acceleration
• Dedicated Ethernet Offload Engine
• Embedded volatile and non-volatile private key storage
• Power Management via advanced wake up capabilities

For me, the telling feature that signals just how completely this SoC solution fits the bill is the integrated USB 3.0 capability. I know it’s the year 2014 and we all expect USB 3.0 ports on new products, but a lot of systems are still relying on discrete add-on chips to provide this function.

Power consumption is seemingly more important for some than others. From a macro point of view, it’s actually important to Everyone, since energy politics drives so much of our global experience. But, I digress…. The Thecus N2310 is designed to be a low power device, and even with two HDDs spinning away inside of it, it manages to do just that. Power usage will depend somewhat on which drives are installed, but a lot of the energy is saved by turning the drives off when data is not required. The APM86491 SoC is enhanced by AppliedMicro’s Scalable Lightweight Intelligent Management Processor (SLIMpro), a separate ARM processor subsystem that provides power management and a number of other features. Think of all the power management features that Benchmark Reviews has highlighted in our PC motherboard reviews over the last few years. Almost all of them have featured a separate power management IC (or two, or three…). In the embedded processor world, those functions are now integrated on a single chip, even if there is a dedicated processor on the die just for the “overhead management” tasks. You can’t argue with the results, and 5W for the overhead functions is a very light electrical load. In most of the US, that equals a yearly operating cost of $3.50. Adding two HDDS into the mix will increase that by about seven to nine dollars a year, depending on your choice of hard drives.

Even though the AppliedMicro SoC provides interfaces for two Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbps ports, there is still a need for a transceiver chip to shake hands with the outside world. The tech term for that part of the interface is PHY, which is short for physical layer. The Thecus N2310 uses a Realtek RTL8211E Ethernet transceiver to provide 10Base-T, 100Base-T, and 1000Base-T capability. This IC performs all the necessary electrical tasks, to transmit and receive Ethernet packets over standard CAT5 cable.

512 MB of DDR3-1066 memory is standard on the Thecus N2310. Two ICs with a 96 ball FBGA package are soldered directly to the main controller PCB and are not upgradeable or removable. The chips in my sample were supplied by Samsung and they are rated for a variety of DDR3 timings. Given the capability of the DRAM controller on the AppliedMicro SoC that runs the entire NAS, the memory is probably running at DDR3-1066 with timings of 7-7-7 for CL-tRCD-tRP.

Last, but not least is the Flash memory, which holds the operating system and the system configuration details for the NAS. This one chip is 2Gb x8 of SLC-based ECC NAND, and is sourced from mainstream memory manufacturer, Micron. Like the DRAM memory chips, it is soldered directly to the controller board. The little splashes of paint indicate some production control mechanism, either the fact that programming is complete or that it has passed some test function.

To measure isolated NAS power consumption, Benchmark Reviews uses the Kill-A-Watt EZ (model P4460) power meter made by P3 International. Obviously, power consumption is going to depend heavily on the number and type of drives that are installed. The power draw also depends on the fan speed that’s required to keep the drives cool. When the Thecus N2310 first boots up, it peaked briefly at 31 W, and then once the system completes its boot process, and got into normal operating mode, it settled in at 13 watts of power consumption. With one drive installed and during Write operations, it drew 15W; Read operations drew 14W. Formatting and building a RAID 1 array used 24W, and then the N2310 settled down to a steady 19W. Write operations in RAID 1 mode used 23W, and Read operations used 21W. When the unit is turned off, I couldn’t detect any power consumption at all. Usually, Vampire mode still pulls a small amount of power. The Kill-A-Watt power meter can’t display differences less than 1 watt, so the N2310 may be using some power, but it’s less than a watt.

We’ve seen the ins and outs of the hardware, and the technology under the hood; now let’s take a quick look through the list of features that you get with the Thecus N2310. The next couple of sections are critical to understanding what features you get with these units, and what you don’t. It’s not just a box full of drives; a modern NAS server is capable of more than that, and some NAS devices are more capable than others.

As the volume of personal and business data continue to rise exponentially, the systems we use to store and manage it have become more complex. I started my long relationship with computers when program storage meant a shoebox full of punch cards. Now, a bare-bones PC starts off with almost a million files on it BEFORE you add your own data. I’m not going to tell you that computing is going to get any simpler, that’s an outright lie, but I can say that the tools we use to manage them are going to make it easier. Thecus has introduced several new features with the N2310. We’ll look at the newest and most unique features first, and then cover some of the more common ones.

T-OnTheGo Mobile App

The Thecus N2310 ships with a NAS management app that lets users access, copy, stream, and edit any data on their NAS, from either an iOS or Android mobile devices. This is it, the defining notion of ubiquitous computing; access your own personal cloud, from anywhere with internet access. The app makes it all seamless, without having to worry about IP addresses or URLs.

DDNS

If you need more structured access than what you get on your Smartphone, then you have the option of easy access to your NAS via Dynamic DNS (DDNS). Remote access with an easy-to-remember URL allows users to access their NAS files via the internet. DDNS provides each user with a unique domain name to make NAS management much more convenient. When the IP address is changed, the DDNS server will automatically adjust, to make sure that remote access is always available

PLEX Media Center

In a modern digital home, content can be delivered to any screen, anywhere in the house. The Thecus N2310 supports that theme with an app called Plex Media Server. This free server app is available on the Thecus App Center, and it allows you to set up and manage all the media that’s stored on your NAS network storage server. With the Plex Media Server installed on your Thecus NAS, devices on your network, such as your Xbox 360, can connect to and stream your local and online media.

SuperSpeed USB 3.0

Once you’re used to Gigabit transfer speeds with your NAS, the thin trickle of DATA that passes through USB 2.0 becomes a painful experience. USB comes to the rescue on the N2310, with a max data rate that’s 10x faster. Theoretical throughput is up to 5Gb/s, but there aren’t any USB devices I know of that will actually provide that kind of speed. There is only one USB 3.0 port on the N2310, and it’s located on the rear panel.

Native BitTorrent Support

Included in ThecusOS 6 is Transmission, a powerful BitTorrent client. Easily add torrent seed files to Transmission and sit back and relax as your NAS does the rest, independent of your computer. Once downloaded, your files will be automatically stored in your NAS P2P folder where you’ll be able to access them across your network or through the internet. The N2310’s native BitTorrent support allows set and forget torrenting, that’s accessible anywhere.

Data Guard

The Data Guard backup solution is flexible software that provides both local and remote components. In normal fashion, data is backed up across RAID volumes, external USB drives, and eSATA drives. In addition, Data Guard can sync data across the network to other NAS devices or servers. I’m a big proponent of remote backups, so this is a big deal for me.

Now that we’ve seen a few of the newest features that Thecus offers, let’s look at the Specifications for the N2310 NAS network storage server.

Hardware Specifications

• Processor: AMCC APM 86491 800Mhz
• System Memory: 512 MB DDR3
• LAN Interface: RJ-45×1: 10/100/1000 BASE-TX, Auto MDI/MDI-X
• USB 2.0: port x1 (back x1)
• USB 3.0: port x1 (back x1)
• Display: N/A
• SATA DOM: 2Gb x8
• HDMI Output: N/A
• VGA Output: N/A
• Audio: N/A
• Disk Interface: 2 x SATA-II (3Gb/s) for internal
• Power Supply: 40W External PSU (Channel Well Technology)
• UPS Support: USB 2.0
• Environment: Temperature: 5°C to 40°C
• Humidity: 0 ~ 80 % R.H. (Non-condensing)
• Dimensions: (HxWxD) 135 x 97 x 207 (mm)
• Weight: 0.79 kg
• Certificates: CE/FCC/C-Tick/VCCI/BSMI, RoHS, WEEE

Software Specifications

The Thecus N2310 is principally designed for home use, but that doesn’t mean that it lacks features. From a network perspective, the typical home environment looks very similar to a small business these days. When you have to combine the latest high tech devices, the legacy hardware and applications that everyone still has hanging around, the need to grant granular access to multiple terabytes of data with varying sensitivity, unified communications, and peripheral sharing – it can be a challenge. A number of business-class features, like VMware support, have been omitted from the N2310 software, which is completely appropriate. There are many NAS servers in the Thecus product line that can fulfill that business role, and the N2310 is geared toward a different kind of customer altogether.

RAID

• RAID Modes: RAID 0, 1 and JBOD
• Auto-rebuild: Supported
• Hot-swap: Supported

Disk

• Bad Block Scanning: Supported
• SMART Info: Supported
• SMART Test: Supported
• Disk Roaming:
• Supports volume-based roaming to other N2310

Network

• Configuration: Fixed IP address, dynamic IP address
• Transport Protocols: TCP/IP, AppleTalk
• File Protocols: SMB/CIFS, HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, AFP
• TCP/IP: IPV6 & IPV4

System Status

• Syslog Management:
  • Send syslog to assigned location
  • Act as syslog server to receive log info from other systems

Data Access

• Client OS Support :
  • Windows XP and above
  • Windows Server 2003 and above
  • Mac OS X
  • Linux

• FTP: Built-in FTP server with bandwidth control
• Secure FTP: Built-in secure FTP server with bandwidth control
• Download Manager: BT Transmission
• Printer Server (IPP):
  • Supports USB printers
  • Supports a wide range of IPP printers
  • Client can manage print tasks (list/delete) via web user interface

Data Backup

• Client Incremental Data Backup: Thecus Backup Utility
• Data Burn:
  • Create files to ISO image and burn to optical disc
  • Create files to ISO image
  • Read ISO image from optical disc and write to NAS

• Mac OS X Time Machine: Supported
• Data Guard: Remote Backup/Local Backup

Power Management

• Scheduled Power On/Off: Supported

Volume Management

• File System: EXT4

Multimedia Support

• iTunes Server: Supports AAC, MP3 w/ID3 tag and WAV
• Piczza! Photo Server (via module):
  • Supports GIF, JPG (JPEG), BMP, PNG
  • Supports EXIF display
  • Supports slide show
  • Media Server: Supports uPnP AV streaming protocol

User Authentication

• Local User: Supports built-in user accounts
• Local Group: Supports built-in user groups

File System

• Type: Journaling File System
• Language Support: Unicode Support
• Authorization (ACL): “Read”, “write”, or “deny” privileges to individual users or groups in folders and sub-folders
• User Quota: Supported

Administration

• User Interface: Web-based user interface supports English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish and Czech
• Utility Program (Intelligent NAS):
  • MS Windows Setup Wizard
  • Supports Windows XP and above
  • Windows Server 2003 and above
  • Mac OS X Setup Wizard
  • Email Notifications: Sends system messages via email to the system administrator
  • DDNS: Supports one free DDNS registration (e.g. xxx.thecuslink.com)
  • UPnP and Port forwarding: Supports auto setting in Intranet environment
  • Intelligent NAS: Go through defined URL for auto install (install.thecus.com)

Mobile Applications (iOS/Android)

• T-Dashboard: Mobile monitoring and administration
• T-OnTheGo: Upload, download and stream multimedia

Others

• Recycling Bin: Supported
• Web Disk: Supported

The first thing you need to do with most NAS devices is discover them on your network and set them up. Most NAS vendors bundle a small, lightweight “finder” application with their products that has some system utilities included. Instead of using the supplied CD, I went right to the web application at https://install.theccus.com where the manufacturer maintains the latest and greatest version of the installation program. I normally like to do the setup manually, both because I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the inner workings of the product, and also because when it comes to computers I’m a control freak. This time, I decided I should learn how 99% of the rest of the world does it, so I followed the simple instructions on the Quick Install Guide, which took me here.

Once I had followed the step-by-step instructions and installed version 1.01.08 of the intelligent NAS application, then we went through the steps of Device Discovery, System Login, Network Configuration, and Password maintenance, all before logging in to the full monitoring & control applications via the web browser. There are a number of sub-menus that you go through during initial setup; once you do that, the setup wizard is still available in case you get forget your password or need to reconfigure the NAS. Otherwise, just use your browser and login to whatever IP address that the NAS is configured to; the default is 192.168.1.100.

Once the initial setup is complete, and you log in to the main admin application, you will find the home page for your Thecus NAS. The latest version of the main control application is now called ThecusOS, and at first it looks like it’s missing about a dozen icons. Once you click on the small “Tools” icon on the far left of the light grey strip, you get a new pop-up window with all the Control Panel icons. The control apps are divided up into the following sub-groups:

• System Management
• Storage
• System Network
• File Sharing / Privilege
• Network Services
• Application Server
• Module Management
• Backup
• External Devices

Within each group are several small apps, from 1-2 up to 15+, depending on the complexity of the sub-group. System Management has 16 icons, ranging from the simple task of setting the date and time on the NAS device, to the critical and more complex Network Settings.

One of the critical aspects of setting up a NAS is the networking configuration. It’s so easy to get it wrong and accidentally shut down access, that Thecus includes tools in their setup wizard application, which you can still access after you inadvertently locked yourself out. If you get it completely out of whack, it’s still possible to recover by using the system reset function, which can be accessed with a small button on the rear panel. There is only one Ethernet port to configure, so Teaming or Port Trunking or Link Aggregation options are absent. IPv4 and IPv6 are both accommodated in both manual configuration and DHCP modes. Jumbo Frames is supported, as well as the standard MTU value of 1500. At the top of the screen, and one level up in the network hierarchy, are settings for the Host Name, Domain Name, and DNS Settings. The defaults loaded during the initial setup are generated using DHCP, but manual settings are allowed. Status information is provided for the connection, including the link speed which is more than likely going to be 1,000 Mb/s, or GbE as its known today.

There is one place in the setup process where you may benefit greatly from reading the manual ahead of time. It’s really too bad that this information didn’t make it onto the setup screen, as it could cause an aborted setup. If you are installing HDDs that already have data on them, or if they have been configured in another system already, you should choose the Manual RAID Creation option at the bottom of the screen. Don’t worry about making the install too difficult, as the next steps are very simple and easy. With only two drive bays the choices are limited to JBOD, RAID 0, and RAID 1 and all you have to do is pick one of those choices from a menu.

Once you’re all done, you get the chance to review the system configuration before you hit the Submit button and load all the selected settings. You can go backwards from this screen and make any desired changes, so it’s not like some setup routines where you have to start all over from scratch.

Let’s look at the RAID migration process a little. I started with a single drive and the way the N2310 treated that was to call it a JBOD configuration. That seems counterintuitive to me, since there was only one disk, but it’s just another way of saying that all disks physically installed in the NAS will be treated as individual disk volumes. Next, I installed one additional disk and configured the pair of them as RAID 1. There is no way to migrate from a JBOD setup to a RAID volume, the data stored on the JBOD disks has to be deleted. Not a problem for me, and most users won’t need to follow this path, but it’s something to be aware of. So I deleted the existing volume and started the RAID Volume Creation process. One of the options Thecus offers is Quick RAID, which shortens the RAID creation time if you are using drives that have not been partitioned. I was re-using drives that had previously been installed in another NAS, so I couldn’t use this option. Because there are only two drive bays on the N2310 I had only a couple of options, including RAID 0 and RAID 1. I chose RAID 1 because it’s the most useful option of the two. It gives you full data redundancy, while RAID 0 only gives a small increase in steady-state throughput.

Ok, if you’ve been following along this far, there’s not much more I can show you except how fast it is. So let’s get down to some benchmarking, and compare it to a variety of other NAS products that we’ve looked at in the recent past.

Benchmark Reviews primarily uses metric data measurement for testing storage products, for anyone who is interested in learning the relevant history of this sore spot in the industry, I’ve included a small explanation below:

The basic unit data measurement is called a bit (one single binary digit). Computers use these bits, which are composed of ones and zeros, to communicate their contents. All files are stored as binary files, and translated into working files by the Operating System. This two number system is called a “binary number system”. In comparison, the decimal number system has ten unique digits consisting of zero through nine. Essentially it boils down to differences between binary and metric measurements, because testing is deeply impacted without carefully separating the two. For example, the difference between the transfer time of a one-Gigabyte (1000 Megabytes) file is going to be significantly better than a true binary Gigabyte (referred to as a Gibibyte) that contains 1024 Megabytes. The larger the file used for data transfer, the bigger the difference will be.

Have you ever wondered why your 500 GB hard drive only has about 488 GB once it has been formatted? Most Operating Systems utilize the binary number system to express file data size, however the prefixes for the multiples are based on the metric system. So even though a metric “Kilo” equals 1,000, a binary “Kilo” equals 1,024. Are you confused yet? Don’t be surprised, because even the most tech savvy people often mistake the two. Plainly put, the Kilobyte is expressed as 1000 bytes, but it is really comprised of 1,024 bytes.

Most network engineers are not fully aware that the IEC changed the way we calculate and name data chunks when they published the new International Standards back in December 1998. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) removed the old metric prefixes for multiples in binary code with new prefixes for binary multiples made up of only the first two letters of the metric prefixes and adding the first two letters of the word “binary”. For example, instead of Megabyte (MB) or Gigabyte (GB), the new terms would be Mebibyte (MiB) or Gibibyte (GiB). While this is the new official IEC International Standard, it has not been widely adopted yet because it is either still unknown by institutions or not commonly used.
All the NAS devices we test cannot accommodate all the different disk configurations, so our current test protocol has been based on two of the most popular setups: a basic (single) disk and RAID-5 configurations. Most NAS products that can support RAID 5 go beyond the minimum number of drive bays, to a total of four, so that is the number of drives that I typically use to test with, even though I could get by with only three. During initial setup, I didn’t see any opportunity to upgrade to the latest firmware, and I didn’t see the option on the Thecus website, at least for the N2310. The firmware installed on the N2310 was OS6.build_677 when I received it, and it stayed that way throughout the testing. I downloaded the ThecusOS application, a browser-based monitoring and control application, from the dedicated installation page at https://install.thecus.com, and got version 1.01.08. It’s a relatively new version, because the latest user manual on the Thecus website references version 1.01.07.

I connected the NAS directly to an Intel X520-T2 10Gbps Ethernet NIC in the test-bench system, with a ten-foot CAT6 patch cable. I set up a static IP address on the host PC, consistent with the default address of the Turbo NAS unit, and we were in business.

Although I wasn’t expecting to get throughput results that were faster than GbE speeds, I kept the test bench PC configuration the same as it has been, since I upgraded it for 10GbE testing. That means I was bypassing the SSD on the test rig and sending/receiving data from a RAM Disk. I’m using RAMDisk v3.5.1.130R22 from Dataram based on performance tests in several reviews (we read ’em, too….) and its reasonable cost structure. I assigned a little more than 10GB of space to the RAM Disk, in order to replicate the test protocol I’ve been using for all my NAS testing. One other trick was necessary; to get the RAM Disk to transfer files larger than 2GB, I had to use the “Convert” utility in Windows to make the RAM Disk into an NTFS volume.

For basic throughput evaluation, the NAS product received one test transfer followed by at least three timed transfers. Each test file was sent to the Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB (WD7502AAEX) hard drive installed in the NAS for a timed NAS write test, and that same file was sent back to the RAM Disk in the test system to perform a NAS read test. Each test was repeated several times, the high and low values were discarded and the average of the remaining results was recorded and charted.

The Read and Write transfer tests were conducted on each NAS appliance using the 1 GB file and then a 10 GB file. A second set of tests are conducted with Jumbo Frame enabled, i.e. the MTU value for all Ethernet controllers on the network is increased from 1500 to 9000. Most of the NAS products tested to date in the Windows 7 environment have supported the Jumbo Frame configuration. Only the NETGEAR ReadyNAS NV+ v2 uses the 1500 MTU setting by default, and has no user-accessible controls to change that; you’ll see that reflected in the charts. I used a single GbE connection for all tests; there’s only one available on the N2310, and I have not achieved consistent results using the IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) mode.

I also ran the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT) version 1.7.1, which was originally designed to run on a Windows XP client. People smarter than me have figured out how to run it under Windows 7, including the 64-bit version that is used more often than the 32-bit version these days. NASPT brings an important perspective to our test protocol, as it is designed to measure the performance of a NAS system as viewed from the end user’s perspective. Benchmarks like ATTO use Direct I/O Access to accurately measure disk performance with minimal influence from the OS and the host platform. This provides important, objective data that can be used to measure raw, physical performance. While it’s critical to measure the base performance, it’s also important to quantify what you can expect using real-world applications, and that’s exactly what NASPT does. One of the disadvantages of NASPT is that it is influenced by the amount of memory installed on the client, and it was designed for systems that had 2-4 GB of RAM. Consequently, two of the tests give unrealistic results, because they are measuring the speed of the buffer on the client, instead of the actual NAS performance. For that reason, we will ignore the results for “HD Video Record” and “File Copy to NAS”. I’m also not going to pay too much attention to the “Content Creation” test, as it is too heavily focused on computing tasks that aren’t really handled by the NAS.

Benchmark Reviews was also able to measures NAS performance using some tests that are traditionally used for internal drives. The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. CrystalDiskMark 3.0 is a file transfer and operational bandwidth benchmark tool from Crystal Dew World that offers performance transfer speed results using sequential, 512KB random, and 4KB random samples. Benchmark Reviews uses CrystalDiskMark to illustrate operational IOPS performance with multiple threads, which allows us to determine operational bandwidth under heavy load.

The chart above, showing the typical results from an ATTO Disk Benchmark test run, highlights the one problem I had with the Thecus N2310 configuration. When I switched over to Jumbo Frames on the network controllers, the Write performance was degraded immensely. You can see how small the red bars are in the graph here. With standard MTU of 1500, the Read and Write performance were much closer to one another. I suspect this problem was caused by the NIC in my test bed PC, which uses an MTU of 9014 instead of the nominal value of 9000, which is what the Thecus uses. MTU mismatches are a no-no, and I don’t know why there isn’t better compliance to some standard for the Jumbo Frame settings. You’ll see the effects of this anomaly in the basic file transfer tests, because they show results for both 1500 and 9000 (nominal) MTU. I only published the results from the 1500 MTU configuration for the remainder of the benchmarks. This is clearly a situation you need to be aware of when setting up your own NAS and the rest of you network. At this point, my recommendation is to stick with an MTU value of 1500 for every device on the network.

We are continuing our NAS testing with the exclusive use of Windows 7 as the testing platform for the host system. The performance differences between Win7 and XP are huge, as we documented in our QNAP TS-259 Pro review. The adoption rate for Win 7 has been very high, and Benchmark Reviews has been using Win 7 in all of our other testing for some time now. It was definitely time to make the jump for NAS products.

NAS Comparison Products

• QNAP TS-870U-RP 8-bay SATA NAS Server
• EonNAS 1100 NAS Network Storage Server
• ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS Network Storage Server
• EonNAS 850X NAS Network Storage Server
• Thecus N5550 4-Bay SATA NAS Server
• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 4-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-879U-RP 8-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-219P+ 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-259 Pro 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-659 Pro II 6-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-419P II 4-bay SATA NAS Server

• (1) Western Digital Caviar Black WD7502AAEX 750GB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″

• Intel E10G42BT, X520-T2, 10Gbps Ethernet NIC, PCIe 2.0 x8, 2x CAT6a

• Dataram RAMDisk v3.5.1.130R22
• Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT) version 1.7.1
• ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.47
• CrystalDiskMark 3.0
• 10-Foot Category-6 Solid Copper Shielded Twisted Pair Patch Cable
• 1 metric Gigabyte Test File (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes)
• 10 metric Gigabyte Test File (10 GB = 10,000,000,000 bytes)

• Motherboard: MSI Z68-Express Z68A-GD80 (1.23.1108 BIOS)
• System Memory: 4x 4GB Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600MHz (9-9-9-24)
• Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (BX80623I52500K)
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright Venomous-X (Delta AFB1212SHE PWM Fan)
• Video: Intel HD Graphics 3000
• Drive 1: OCZ Agility3 SSD 120GB (AGT3-25SAT3-120G)
• Drive 2: OCZ Agility3 SSD 120GB (AGT3-25SAT3-120G)
• Optical Drive: Sony NEC Optiarc DVD (AD-7190A-OB 20X)
• Enclosure: Lian Li Armorsuit PC-P50R
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-750TX ATX12V V2.2 750Watt
• Monitor: SOYO 24″; Widescreen LCD Monitor (DYLM24E6) 1920X1200
• Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate Version 6.1 (Build 7600)

The bottom line for any storage device is the combination of capacity and transfer speed. For a network attached storage server, the differences are all about the infrastructure that is placed around the basic HDD array. Since capacity is something that’s easy to define and measure, the real question for any NAS product is how fast will it Read and Write data. For this reason, Benchmark Reviews primarily measures NAS performance as the bandwidth achieved during a file transfer test. The first tests we perform utilize a single 1GB (1000 megabytes / 1,000,000,000 bytes) file in a transfer to and from the NAS.

With all the NAS units operating in single disk mode, many of the units have broadly similar performance. The differences are often down to CPU performance in this test, although some of the other infrastructure does have an impact. The Thecus N2310 averaged read speeds of 99.6 MB/s with an MTU of 1500, and gained a few with Jumbo Frames, up to 102.7 MB/s. This is excellent performance, considering the modest hardware resources which the N2310 brings to the table. Also, note that the performance with and without jumbo frames is pretty balanced; more on that in a second. It definitely looks like the N2310 architecture can hold its own in Read performance; let’s look at Write performance next.

Moving on to the 1 GB write bandwidth test, the N2310 develops a split personality, as the jumbo frame results go down to the bottom, while the 1500 MTU results stay right where they should be. As I mentioned in the test methodology section, I recommend keeping the N2310 on the standard MTU setting of 1500. With that setting, write results averaged 90.7 MB/s, which is again, excellent results for such an unassuming hardware platform. At this point, I think I can declare that the AppliedMicro APM86491 kicks sand in the face of the Marvell processor that is widely used by a number of other NAS manufacturers. The Intel-based NAS servers all do a bit better, but they don’t offer massive performance increases.

Next up is 10 GB (1000 metric megabytes / 10,000,000,000 bytes) file transfer testing. Using the single-disk configuration in each NAS, and a Gigabit Ethernet connection, network throughput will be put to the test, and the effect of any system or hardware caches will be minimized.

Examining 10GB basic file transfer speeds, the mid-range QNAP models all got a boost, compared to the 1 GB file transfers. Their read speed went up by approximately 10 MB/s, to a combined average of 95 MB/s. The Thecus N2310 delivered read performance that was once again nestled in between the Intel Atom-based results and the lower performance provided by the Marvell-based models. With standard MTU, it reached an average read speed of 102.7 MB/s, and with Jumbo Frames it got a small boost to 103.8 MB/s. Clearly none of these units were bothered by handling very large files. Later in our testing, we will look at some other NAS test protocols that feature small file sizes, which is a common situation for backup applications. Once again, you get none of the advantages of redundancy with a single disk or JBOD configuration, and most NAS users will go for one of the RAID configurations. Although I didn’t run a full test suite on the RAID 1 configuration with the Thecus N2310, I ran enough to see that the results with RAID 1 were generally consistent with the single disk performance.

In our 10GB write performance tests, the performance of all the NAS units is similar to their showing with the smaller sized, 1 GB file. Gains of a couple MB/s were common across the board, and the Thecus N2310 posts an average write speed of 93.3 MB/s with 1500 MTU. What’s really impressive here is the performance compared to the QNAP NAS models running dual core Intel Atom CPUs. That’s a very powerful processor by NAS standards, and the Thecus still beats it.

Since the Thecus N2310 doesn’t support the RAID 5 configuration that we normally use to test intermediate and large format NAS products, we won’t be including those results in this review. The single disk results show that the N2310 is a very capable performer that is equal or better than the competing products based on Intel or Marvell processors. Just be very careful if you need to run it on a network that is completely configured for jumbo frames. The write performance could suffer, depending on the host configuration.

• QNAP TS-870U-RP 8-bay SATA NAS Server
• EonNAS 1100 NAS Network Storage Server
• ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS Network Storage Server
• EonNAS 850X NAS Network Storage Server
• Thecus N5550 4-Bay SATA NAS Server
• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 4-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-879U-RP 8-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-219P+ 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-259 Pro 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-659 Pro II 6-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-419P II 4-bay SATA NAS Server

NASPT brings an important perspective to our test protocol, as it is designed to measure the performance of a NAS system, as viewed from the end user’s perspective. Benchmarks like ATTO use Direct I/O Access to accurately measure disk performance with minimal influence from the OS and the host platform. This provides important, objective data that can be used to measure raw, physical performance. While it’s critical to measure the base performance, it’s also important to quantify what you can expect using real-world applications, and that’s exactly what NASPT does. One of the disadvantages of NASPT is that it is influenced by the amount of memory installed on the client, and it was designed for systems that had 2-4 GB of RAM. Consequently, two of the tests give unrealistic results with modern systems, because they are measuring the speed of the buffer on the client, instead of the actual NAS performance. For that reason, we will completely ignore the results for “HD Video Record” and “File Copy to NAS”.

With a single, basic GbE interface in place, no individual test gets past the ~ 120 MB/s theoretical barrier, but several of them are in the 70-90 MB/s range. Some of the tests have very low transfer rates, and that’s due to the nature of the test. The Content Creation test for example, simulates a user creating a web page, accessing multiple sources for the content. The Directory Copy tests use several hundred directories and several thousand files to test a typical backup and restore scenario. That’s one of the most real-world types of test, and it’s useful for all of us to have a standard set of test data to use, because my directory of 1,000 random small files is never going to be the same as your directory of 1,000 random small files.

In keeping with the real-world scenario of this particular benchmark, I normally run these tests only on the RAID 5 configuration, since that is what most users with a mid-size NAS are going to use. It just doesn’t make sense to run realistic test scenarios on unrealistic hardware configurations. I couldn’t do that in this case, but I did run them on the single disk setup. This is the first time I’ve had a small NAS on the test bench since I started using NASPT, so I don’t have any comparative results to share. I don’t want to mix these results in with the others on a common chart, as that would not be a fair comparison. So for now, here are the summary results representing an average of five individual runs. As a whole, these are very good results. Considering that only one disk is in operation here, I’m surprised by how close the results are to all the 4-bay NAS servers that I’ve tested with RAID 5 configurations. Of course, the single GbE interface is the short pole in the tent, to borrow and butcher a common corporate phrase. Even with four disks spinning away, the 125 MB/s theoretical Ethernet limitation scales everything back. Even though they’re close, I still don’t want to mix the two sets of results together. Just know that this is very competitive performance, and if your storage requirements don’t dictate four bays worth of disks running RAID 5, you don’t need to give up throughput performance.

The Intel NASPT benchmarking tool measures tasks that almost any NAS user would be interested in. Whether they have one disk, two, four, or eight, the workload doesn’t change much. The workload changes when the environment does; a NAS in a LAN room of a SMB probably handles different scenarios than one that sits on a shelf in someone’s home, next to the cable modem and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi router. The results above are quite respectable for a home-based NAS server, which is almost always going to be limited by the bandwidth of a single GbE connection. When I first thought about running the NASPT tests, I told myself, “What’s the point, you can’t compare them to the NAS servers you’ve already tested.” After seeing the results, I now see that this benchmark still represents a valid test. The results are definitely more realistic than let’s say, running Crysis on an 8400GT video card….oh wait, that crashed.

Let’s look at a couple more benchmarks that test both sequential and random access performance: ATTO Disk Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark.

In addition to measuring simple timed transfers, to determine how fast it will read and write contiguous blocks of data, Benchmark Reviews was also able to measures NAS performance using some tests that are traditionally used for internal drives. By mapping the Thecus N2310 as a local drive, some of our favorite HDD/SSD benchmarking tools worked just fine. Just like the NASPT test suite, I normally run these tests on the RAID 5 configuration, as that is the most realistic scenario for the NAS system I’ve tested since I began using these benchmarking tools. Some NAS products don’t work too well with this type of test program; even though they may have the ability to map the NAS device to a drive letter, they’re still not treated like local drives by the Operating System. I didn’t have that problem with the Thecus N2310, so let’s look at some results…
The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. There are some minor improvements made to the 2.46 version of the program that allow for test lengths up to 2GB, but all of our benchmarks are conducted with 256MB total length. ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Please consider the results displayed by this benchmark to be basic bandwidth speed performance indicators.

The Thecus N2310 turned in a decent performance on ATTO, reaching an average peak Read speed of 117.7 MB/s and a peak Write speed of 110.5 MB/s. These results are clearly competitive with the RAID 5 NAS performance I’ve measured on the mid-sized storage servers, and a faster networking connection is required in order to move beyond this level. Once more, it looks like you don’t have to give up on throughput performance, just because your storage needs are modest and you only need a two-bay NAS server.

It’s good to keep in mind that these ATTO tests are not always indicative of real-world performance, due to the sequential access mode used. In most cases, the results are going to be close to the numbers achieved in timed Read and Write tests. They are also going to be way above the results from some of the more challenging tests in the Intel NASPT suite. It’s interesting to note that the maximum performance level was nearly reached by the 32 kB block size. While this is not an exact indicator of random Read/Write performance, it at least matches the typical performance of the RAID 5 devices that I’ve tested.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 is a file transfer and operational bandwidth benchmark tool from Crystal Dew World that offers performance transfer speed results using sequential, 512KB random, and 4KB random samples. For our test results chart below, the 4KB 32-Queue Depth Read and Write performance was measured using a 1000MB space. CrystalDiskMark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Benchmark Reviews uses CrystalDiskMark to illustrate operational IOPS performance with multiple threads. In addition to our other tests, this benchmark allows us to determine operational bandwidth under heavy load.

The combination of the Thecus N2310 and a single Western Digital Caviar Black WD7502AAEX 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s hard drive generates some decent numbers in this test. It pulled a respectable 70.2 MB/s average on sequential Read and a very good 100.6 MB/s average on sequential Write tests. The 4k tests show very low numbers, but that’s typical of HDDs, even in a RAID configuration. That’s one of the huge advantages that SSDs bring to the table, is the ability to handle thousand of small data chunks very gracefully. A RAID system will typically do better when the Queue Depth is increased; this is usually a killer test for most storage systems, and a single disk setup can’t handle it.

All in all, these are a respectable set of results for a single disk implementation of Network Attached Storage. Sure, they’re lower than a true local drive connection, directly into the SATA controller on the motherboard. But, for a NAS device mimicking a local HDD, the Thecus N2310 performs well.

I think I’ve said this before but, Everybody needs a NAS. Most people don’t know what that means though, so I have to continue on and say, Everybody needs a private Cloud. Despite the fact that few people know what a cloud actually IS, everyone innately understands that they need one, or two… That’s OK, because most people actually know what to DO with a cloud, and the whole point of cloud computing is that the user doesn’t have any reason to know what’s going on inside the cloud. It’s meant to be as opaque as possible, because the focus is on the services that the cloud provides, not the mechanics of how it works. Pay very close attention to what it does, not how the cloud does it.

My first and solemn duty is to remind everyone that relying on a collection of drives in any RAID configuration for data backup purposes is a huge error. RAID systems provide protection against loss of services, not loss of data. Several examples will illustrate the problem, I hope:

• the drive controller goes bad and corrupts the data on all the drives in the array
• the entire storage device is physically or electrically damaged by external forces
• the entire storage device is lost, stolen, or destroyed
• a single drive in a RAID 5 cluster dies and during the rebuild process, which puts higher stress on the remaining drives, a second drive fails
• floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc. (AKA El Niño, Derecho, et. al.)

All these points lead to the inescapable conclusion that multiple drives in a common system, in a single location do not provide effective and reliable data backup. At times in this review I’ve talked about high-availability systems, and the Thecus N2310 fits that description reasonably well when employed in a RAID 1 configuration. With a single drive failure, your data is still available and accessible. The NAS device stays online the entire time while the failed drive is replaced and the array is rebuilt. That’s what RAID systems are designed to do. The inherent redundancy is not meant to serve as a backup file set. Remember, we’re not talking about losing data here, we’re only talking about the ability to keep working uninterrupted, if one or two drives should fail.

In contrast to some Mega-NAS products I’ve tested recently, the Thecus N2310 is a product that most readers of Benchmark Reviews could easily contemplate purchasing. The cost of HDDs is coming down, and the total storage needs of a modern household with all the latest high tech goodies are increasing rapidly. Although you can start with one disk and expand/migrate to RAID volumes later, I would recommend beginning with two drives and RAID 1, to get some data redundancy right away. Especially if you plan on using your NAS as front line storage, if you can avoid having to restore your data from backups, it’s worth it.

The home and small business network is going to stay on Gigabit Ethernet for awhile. The cost to upgrade switches and routers to 10 GbE is still cost prohibitive for everyone who doesn’t have a dedicated LAN room with a couple racks of equipment. Given that your bandwidth is going to be capped at 125 MB/s, if your data storage needs are modest you can get by with a simple RAID 1 system and two drive bays. Look ahead five years if you can, and see what your long term needs are for sure, but if you need to get something in place NOW that will hold you for 1-2 years, don’t hesitate to buy a smaller NAS and put the rest of your money elsewhere.

So, what conclusions can we draw about this high performance, two bay Thecus N2310 NAS server? Click NEXT to find out, and discuss…

Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusions, as they represent our product rating for the sample received, which may differ from retail versions.

The performance of the Thecus N2310 is very competitive, no question about it. It sits either at the top, or very close to it, within its target market. During timed transfers of 1GB and 10GB files the N2310 recorded average Read speeds of 103.8 MB/s and Write speeds of 93.3 MB/s. These are results with a single disk, operating in JBOD mode. I suspect 80%+ of all users will choose the RAID 1 operating mode, and limited results I saw with that arrangement were comparable. I wasn’t able to monitor the AppliedMicro APM86491 processor inside, to see if it was maxed out during these tests. Nor could I see whether the 512MB of SDRAM was being run at or near full capacity. I never saw an impact on transfer speed though, as I was watching the network performance in real-time for many of the test runs. The balancing act of capacity, speed and cost has to land somewhere, and Thecus put together a well-balanced package that delivers the goods at a very low cost. The USB 3.0 performance is a much needed shot in the arm for interfacing with portable devices. The GbE network interface is perfectly suitable here, as there is absolutely no way to fit a 10GbE solution into the component budget for this NAS.

The appearance of the Thecus N2310 is dominated by the decision to fabricate the entire outer shell in plastic. Thecus went with a bold design theme that is all black, and it incorporates a large glossy section in the center that adds a bit of contrast and has a slimming effect. It’s actually smaller than it looks in most of the pictures, and much lighter than any of the other NAS models I’ve tested. The one piece shell for the top and sides minimizes seam lines and makes for a solid-looking package. The indicator lights will normally be shining blue and white, which are good colors for me. One day green will be back in fashion, but not just yet. Most people don’t spend a lot of time looking at their NAS; they just put it on a shelf in the corner, and dust it every now and then.

The construction quality of the Thecus N2310 might seem controversial at first glance, but I think it hits the mark perfectly. Clearly, cost reduction was high on the designer’s list of must-haves. However, I see no places where performance or reliability were sacrificed in the name of economy. Aesthetics, yes. Fit and finish, and that hard-to-define tactile sense of luxury, yes. Component quality and attention to detail in manufacturing, absolutely not. The PCB assembly was produced with very high quality, with good soldering and precise component placement. The board was cleaned very well, with very little of the usual fibers and solvent residues that I’ve seen elsewhere. The drive trays are a little too flexible, and don’t slide in and out as smoothly as some others I’ve tested. They seat firmly in the chassis though, and there are no issues with alignment of the drive with the SATA connectors on the backplane. The outer shell and the inner framework fit together well, came apart easily when needed, and went back together in a snap. Thecus provides a 2 Year warranty, which is reasonable.

The Thecus N2310 is targeted to a growing class of NAS users, I think. The expansion and increased awareness of cloud-based services has really opened the public’s eyes to the advantages of centralized storage, that’s universally accessible. The N2310 offers home users a very cost-effective way of creating a private cloud, that won’t incur monthly fees. Thecus has all the basics covered in their software modules, in addition to mobile access with both iOS and Android. The setup routine has been simplified, and it delivers on the 5-minute marketing promise. There was no way to migrate from JBOD to a RAID configuration without erasing all the data, but this is a common problem for NAS users. Very few vendors have improved on this, and to be fair it just makes good sense to populate both bays and create a RAID 1 array from the start, when you only have two drives to install.

As of January 2014 the Thecus N2310 model was listed for $159.00 at Newegg, and at Amazon. Given the performance and functionality you get, the state-of-the-art AppliedMicro SoC that’s inside, the USB 3.0 port, and the other features it offers, I think that’s a fantastic, low price. For me, the NAS concept has always been a good value proposition, but the Thecus N2310 offers unbelievable value within that paradigm. You are now able to purchase a two bay NAS for the price of a one bay unit, and RAID 1 functionality is within reach for a much larger group of households. As I said at the beginning of this article, Everybody Needs a NAS. With the N2310, Thecus has lowered the barrier to entry further than any of their competitors. Combined with the excellent performance, I think the N2310 represents one of the best values in the NAS market today.

Benchmark Reviews has enjoyed testing a variety of network storage solutions, and with the wide range of products on offer from a number of vendors, anyone in need of a NAS server can find one to fit their current and future needs. The biggest problem is choosing one; that’s why we go into so much detail in our reviews, to help you figure out what level of performance and features is right for you. If you need a staggering array of features and 10GbE-class performance, then you need to look elsewhere to meet those needs. If you just need the storage capacity that two bays of RAID 1 provides, in a small tower package, then the Thecus N2310 represents an outstanding value.

+ High data transfer speeds
+ Amazing value
+ Two bays for the price of one
+ High quality construction
+ Small size and weight
+ Low power usage
+ USB 3.0 port on rear panel
+ Quiet operation
+ Easy, fast setup with online install portal
+ High quality external power supply
+ Additional support apps available online
+ Active Company and Community support

– Can’t migrate from single disk to RAID without erasing data
– Must be on same sub-net as workstation, or use static IPs
– Chassis screws located under adhesive-backed feet
– Drive trays and bays not labeled 1, 2, etc.

• Performance: 9.25
• Appearance: 8.75
• Construction: 8.75
• Functionality: 9.25
• Value: 9.75

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award.

COMMENT QUESTION: How do you use your network storage?