NAS Explained

Network Attached Storage

Times have changed and our storage requirements have moved from kilobytes, to megabytes, to Gigabytes and now even Terabytes of storage. And sure, it won't be long until we reach Petabytes either. Oh and after that there's Exabyte and then Zettabyte.

So we passed the Terabyte marker. With our hefty demand in storage capabilities, the industry had to constantly adapt and introduce new features in hardware. Storage units got much bigger in volume over the year, 6 TB HDDs have just been introduced into the market with 10TB already in the pipeline. In that line of storage solutions there is one product series growing fast and now reaching SOHO and consumer based markets. They are called NAS units, network attached storage. And there has been a lot of development in these nifty little boxes. Pretty much they are little servers that you can hook onto your network and then function as file-server.

The NAS units are often small, do not use a lot of power compared to say your PC, but they are highly configurable, offer redundancy as some models can even handle RAID internally. Network Attachable Units are among the most advanced home servers available on the market today. Products feature multiple HDDs setups, partitions, RAID, USER and USERGROUP based access, FTP, web server, MySQL, hot swappable drives; these are just some of the features that a NAS unit can handle. And though expensive, a product like this is just too darn handy when it comes to file-storage and management over your network. 

The Thecus N5810 in a nutshell

The Thecus N5810 can house up to a lovely five hard drives or SSDs.  The unit is tied to two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, meaning 1000 / 8 minus QOS and random overhead like error-correction is roughly a maximum of 100 to 125 MB/sec on a single link, this unit does allow pairing with the second Ethernet jack. As such the N5810 could also manage up to 213 MB/s read and 186 MB/s write speeds with active usage of 2 Gigabit LAN ports. Your home or office infrastructure will need to support that though. The N5810 supports 7 modes of link aggregation and System Failover creating data, network, and system redundancy. The five HDDs can be set up in a RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and JBOD array with hot-swap and hot-spare supported. Once you have installed your HDDs, you'll need to bind the NAS towards your Ethernet with a CAT5e/6e cable to a switch; the NAS offers more connectors though, you may also make use of USB 2.0/3.0 and also HDMI and line out audio. When you have your HDDs installed, and the device connected through your PC you'll need to start-up a software suite to bind and setup your configuration. Please look at the install CD for that. Or if you have a smartphone, simply use a smartphone app like FING and scan the network, Thecus will show up with a corresponding IP, likely 192.168.1.100. Type in the IP into your browser and you can start setting up the unit. An interesting fact I want to mention is that you are not tied to EXT4 file-systems solely, you can opt EXT3/EXT4/XFS and even Btrfs (but at the cost of perf)

The Thecus N5810 is based upon an Intel Celeron J1900 SoC (Quad-Core) Processor, the Celeron is a 2.0GHz quad-core processor that can boost towards 2.41 GHz. Factory installed this unit comes with a 4GB SO-DIMM DDR3L memory module, but you may expand to a maximum of 8GB (single channel) spread out over two modules (on slot is free). The Thecus N5810 features two Gigabit Ethernet ports to support fail-over and dual-IP setups. Very interesting to see is that at the backside you will also spot an HDMI connector for media playback, missing however is a S/PDIF connector. But yes, the unit can function as 1080P HTPC as well if combined with software like Kodi. You can playback videos from your NAS directly to your HDTV and or audio system. This functionality is controlled via the web interface, or alternatively a smartphone app or you can simply attach a keyboard and mouse to the units USB ports, that actually works. You will notice plenty of USB 3.0 connectors; USB 3.0 host port x3 (Front x1,Back x2) / USB 2.0 host port x2 (Back x2).

Operating system compatibility wise the Thecus N5810 supports file sharing across Linux, UNIX, Mac, and Windows platforms. We will be testing with Windows 10. Also for the more advanced among you, windows AD (Active Directory) is supported to help create an easy-to-access environment. SSH login and web page SSL login enables users to transfer, store, and share data securely. Since this product acts as a server ALL PC's within your network can connect to it. With or without access rights. You can manage it from any client as you simply log into the web-interface and configure it.

But let's dive into a more detailed photo shoot.