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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Namisecond - Friday, December 20, 2013 - link
when your wifi software reports a connection at 54mb/s your actual throughput is not going to be or anywhere near 54mb/s.robinthakur - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
There are many many devices (such as PS3, 360 etc) which cannot access MKV containers where transcoding is the only option from a NAS or building an XBMC frontend box, which is still quite expensive and leads to one more power hungry device on the network. Being able to run XBMC with a media output from the NAS itself would actually be a much better solution for me as long as the CPU isn't getting hit constantly and the deive is near silent. Some people use Android based XBMC, but if you need lossless HD Audio, codec support and proper refresh rate support, your best, quietest, smallest option is actually a Mac mini running XBMC, but they do cost...YaBaBom - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Think users who have laptops/tablets/phones--if they have different devices with different capabilities, it's nice to be able to transcode the content from a high-bitrate original to something that best fits the mobile device. Plex does this automatically via software encoding on Windows boxes--i was really hoping to read that it could use the hardware encoder to do the same thing for multiple users (My old Core2Duo server struggles to do this for just one stream).Nephelai - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
Two pc's each with a data disk. /robocopy once per week. Job done. NAS /shrugganeshts - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
For the average household, 2 PCs at idle will probably consume upward of 40 W (minimum -- assuming they are Atom / Brazos based ones). This one, at load, consumes less than 35 W. You will still miss the mobile app data access functionality and lot of other perks provided by a NAS.Mumrik - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
"However, we never got around to publishing a dedicated review due to severe usability issues with the firmware."No idea how that logic works out. Sounds like it should be a negative review.
ganeshts - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
That was for the Thecus N4800, not the N2560 ; The latter being a 2-bay NAS -- as I mentioned in the summary -- can be an ideal backup target.Hrel - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
"The Thecus N2560 is a 2-bay NAS, and most users are going to use it in a RAID-1 configuration." Based on what? I would only use RAID 0 for a 2 bay NAS. If you mirror you lose half your storage and gain no speed.I've never had a hdd fail on me, so that's not really a concern. But even if I did all the data is backed up to external hdd's as well as the NAS.
What good is a NAS if you have to buy 2 to hold all your stuff? Makes much more sense to have external hdd's as data backup.
Gumby_ - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
For a lot of home users and I'd hedge a guess that for the majority purchasing a 2 bay NAS enclosure, it IS their backup device as well as network attached storage. Should it be? No, is it, probably. Running raid0 would be insanity for this use case.ChoppedBroccoli - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
2 bay NAS with two 1-3TB drives in RAID1 + a service like crashplan is what I am going for (and seems what the majority of users should probably go for).With this you get the following:
* Disk drive failure protection
* Location disaster protection via offsite backup (either Crashplan's servers or your house can burn down)
* 1-3TB of backup space (more than enough for the majority of people)
* Ability to do time machine/windows backups to a partition on these drives wirelessly
* Ability to stream this data to any mobile device
Basically these 2 bay NAS systems really shine when you have a cloud backup service running on the NAS itself.