Thecus N2560: Intel's EvanSport NAS Platform Review
by Ganesh T S on November 25, 2013 3:30 PM ESTMiscellaneous Factors and Final Words
Power Consumption
The Thecus N2560 is a 2-bay NAS, and most users are going to use it in a RAID-1 configuration. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in RAID-1. The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities. It must be noted that the Thecus firmware doesn't allow for single disk to RAID-1 dual disk migration. So, we don't have numbers for RAID-0 to RAID-1 expansion in the table below.
| Thecus N2560 RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power Consumption |
| Idle (No Disks / Powered On) | 11.04 W | |
| 4TB Single Disk Initialization | 21.53 W | |
| 4TB RAID-1 Idle (2 Disks) | 31.06 W | |
| 4TB RAID-1 Rebuild (Replace 1 of 2 Disks) | 12h 11m 56s | 33.85 W |
Comparing this with the ioSafe N2 / Synology DS213, we find that the rebuild is slower on the Thecus N2560. It could indicate that the process is CPU-bound (since the DS213 SoC is clocked higher compared to the CE5335), or the software on the Thecus N2560 is not optimized yet.
Mobile Apps
The T-OnTheGo Android app was also tested out. While we did face some hiccups starting out, referring to the user manual made everything clear (particularly the format in which the dynamic DNS name had to be entered in the app). The app is one of the best parts of the package. It has an in-built media player, and is able to access both the local file system as well as the content on the NAS. Exchange of files between the two was also made possible. While I was feeling a little bit let-down by the Thecus firmware and its capabilities, the mobile app restored my faith a little. I would say that the mobile app is already very usable and feature complete, and Thecus should concentrate on bringing core firmware features out to bring the unit on par with offerings from competitors.
Concluding Remarks
Coming to the business end of the review, we must evaluate the pros and cons by keeping the price of the unit in mind. While the Thecus N2520 retails for around $200, I couldn't find an official price listing for the N2560. Since the only difference is the additional 1GB of RAM, I would imagine it would bump up the price by around $50 or so. The DS213 used to retail for $300 on Newegg (it has since been replaced by the DS214). On the price front (as well as power consumption and performance), I would venture to say that the Thecus N2560 works out OK. However, it is in terms of features and firmware stability that Thecus falls short. Given that single disk to dual disk RAID-1 migration is not possible, and RAID-1 rebuild failed on me multiple times, I wouldn't trust essential data to this NAS. As a backup target, it would probably work out. Thecus really needs to pull up its socks and get the firmware features up to date to match what they claim on their specifications page. This include working XBMC (with full hardware decoding of multiple formats / containers and HD audio passthrough), hardware transcoding for media serving using Plex or a custom app built in-house and encryption support.
From Intel's perspective, the EvanSport platform is an interesting attempt to cater to this market segment. However, they need to work closely with their customers to ensure that such half-baked products are not put out. Many of the SoC's hardware blocks not being used in the firmware. It is not clear where the blame lies - Intel's SDK or laxity on Thecus's part. For a follow-up SoC in this product family, we would obviously like to see an updated Atom core based on the Silvermont microarchitecture (with AES-NI support). It would also be nice to see the number of SATA ports increased to 4 (while retaining or increasing the number of available PCIe lanes).
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chizow - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
It's not just the extra "physical" bays, it's the extra support for the extra features as well as the additional CPU grunt and RAM you generally get with these upgraded units. These add up to additional premium that you undoubtedly see in review results whne jumping up from entry level 2-bay to 4-6-8 bay SOHO NAS units.otherwise - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
For the two NAS' ace240; the software; CPU; and Memory is the same.Gigaplex - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
What they charge and how much it costs them to make are separate things.Solandri - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
But addressing the GP's original question, the cost to make these things does not matter. People keep buying the 2-bay NASes because the manufacturers keep pricing them 4-bay NASes substantially higher.The price premium was big enough for me to build my own 4-drive homebrew NAS. For non-techy people (e.g. my parents) I just get them a 2-bay off-the-shelf NAS.
Hrel - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
I'm sure you're right on actual cost. But the 4 bay ones start $200 higher than the 2 bay NAS's. So it makes a lot more sense to buy a 2 bay NAS in RAID 0 and if you want your data backed up beyond that to just use the cloud or external hdd's.easp - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
Why do people continue to think that products are or should be priced on marginal cost? The up-front engineering and product development costs are often a significant consideration.These engineering efforts are generally focused on an entire product family, and the overall economics of the product family are often predicated on the fact that some of the members of the product line will have larger margins, and others will have smaller margins. Moreover, it is the lower-end items that tend to have the smallest margins, so taking the low-end products as the baseline further distorts the conclusions.
brucek2 - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
This website caters to many hardware enthusiasts who frequently build their own systems, including servers and/or storage systems. If a manufacturer is going to arbitrarily add phantom costs to build(s) with certain configurations, it means that enthusiasts who want those configurations will be more likely to build vs buy in those cases (or switch to the more cost effective configurations.)I have no problem with manufacturers recovering their R&D and making profits. It just sounds in this case like both the hardware BOM and the R&D are very similar for the two models, leading to what I feel is a legitimate question why one would be priced at double the cost of the other.
easp - Thursday, December 5, 2013 - link
Enthusiasts often make the mistake of thinking that they are the target market for every product they see. They aren't, particularly when they don't value their time very highly. I'm guilty of the latter (I buy cheap Xyzel NASs when they are on sale for the purpose of running debian), but I try hard to avoid the former.As to your sense that both hardware BOM and R&D are very similar for the two models, my original point is that reaching that conclusion suggests deeply flawed assumptions. R&D (and marketing costs) costs aren't distributed equally across all members of product families. Some models will have lower prices, lower cost of goods sold and lower margins, while others have higher cost of goods, and disproportionately higher margins and final selling price.
If it helps, look at it this way, if every tier in a product family bore an equal share of R&D and marketing costs, with consistent margins, then the higher-tier models would be somewhat cheaper, but the lower-tier models would be more expensive.
ShieTar - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Difficult to say. With four drives instead of two, you get more heat, more vibrations, more mass. You might hit some design threshold, where all of a sudden you need to have a wider base, use different screws for fixation or add another cooling component.I also think that there are actually plenty of customers who are happy with even a single drive in one of those. Just something to put movies and music on for all family members, and if the drive fails, so what. Its not like anybody made backups of his videotapes in the last century. So for the mass market, it probably makes sense to have a inexpensive 2-Bay unit, plenty of people will check for the cheapest unit which supports what they plan to do.
puremind - Saturday, November 30, 2013 - link
Why would you want an extra Bay if you are not prepared to purchase extra drives anyways?