Final Words & Conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The Thecus N5810 is a pretty spectacular NAS unit, for the money it'll offer many features in the 500 EURO NAS storage domain. For that money you'll receive a foundation based on solid hardware as it is quad-core based, it as well comes with 4 GB of memory with an upgrade option to 8GB and comes with a pretty nifty 5 HDD trays. You could do a RAID solution with some kind of mirroring / striping combo and then use the 5th HDD tray for a hot-spare. So when a driver would fail, the hot-spare will take over and the RAID array would be rebuilt (depending on the RAID level you have enabled of course. That by itself makes this a rock solid product in the SMB and SOHO environment. However in the consumer space the N5810 can make even more sense. The unit has plenty RAM and combined with that HDMI slot you can connect it to your HDTV and mage full HD playback. This function however we have not been able to test with the BETA firmware we have shown you. Be advised though that the processor is marginal here and I do not see it to be a Full HD MKV marvel. Combined with the apps the unit offers the sky is the limit when it comes to running your own webserver based on MySQL. Stuff like joomla etc would not have a problem with this, which what really is, is a small server platform. On the media side of things there are sharing/streaming apps available so that you can stream content towards the player on your TV or alternatively Media box. Downloading wise all your Usenet and Bittorent apps are covered as well. Both offering good download speeds with this NAS. It has to be said though, we have been running a non-public ThecusOS Revsion 7 (build 3.x.x), lots of software apps where not yet available as they likely need to be ported. I opted to test the Beta as it is due for release in the near future and it looks and feels much better than the revision 2 ThecusOS software implementation, which is tremendously outdated to be perfectly honest. ThecusOS 7.0. Beta already runs very stable and fast.

Overall usage

This unit performs at really proper numbers, 99.99% of you guys will have a Gigabit switch and a Gigabit jack on your PC. After QoS and error correction, that is how fast this NAS can be. We had no issues passing 100 MB/sec on our reads and writes. Obviously your HDD can be slower than the performance we just mentioned. Especially with small files (heaps of them) a 5400 RPM 6TB HDDD will be slow. It's the HDD, not the NAS, so please keep that in mind. Lovely to see however is that you can mount an SSD and enable SSD caching. This way your read/write/IO/iops performance will dramatically increase, but at the cost of an SSD and one HDD tray of course.

Even though this unit has one simple 10W Intel based Intel Celeron J1900 that is quad-core at 2 GhHz and has 4GB of RAM it remains to be a fast, flexible, energy efficient unit. Combined with the new Beta software suite this NAS just oozes features. This box is highly configurable in terms of HDDs capability. You get SATA600 connectors (SATA3) and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and JBOD with this 5 tray version brings extra value into this little NAS unit. Don't care about RAID, I would for the love of gawd not know what to do with it, but you could insert say five 8 TB HDDs in JBOD, that's 40 TB of data storage man. A notable mention as well is that the OS supports multiple file-systems for local storage like the always popular EXT4 system, XFS and Btrfs are supported as well. The Btrfs filesystem has options like pooling, checksums, and other features. However, perf with Btrfs will be slower opposed to XFS and EXT4. But hey choices are good right ?

Performance

We reached high transfer speeds over our Gigabit Ethernet connection and though Ethernet will always bring in some performance and lag issues over a network connection, it's plenty fast for all your activities. With large files and a fast enough HDD over a Gigabit connection you will reach 100~115 MB/sec on read and writes. So for this type of connection, really it can hardly go any faster. The performance comes from the processor, the quad-core Celeron is plenty fast and combined with 4 GB memory, you are set really. Even for the GUI and OS side of things we can say that the NAS is responsive and very fast. The usage of this processor also makes your applications fast and responsive, anything Apache and mysql related for home usage will function fast as well. The usage of this quad-core processor also makes your applications fast enough, anything Apache and MySQL related for home usage will function fine as well.  Yeah for a unit that draws roughly 15~20 Watts (based on one HDD) I am still a little surprised. 

Flexibility

You'll have your FTP server, you can upload images and music, make slideshows out of it and show it on the web server of the device or watch photos and videos with the help of a software suite on even your smartphone. You can stream DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) and this NAS can be automatically discovered by Digital Media Players (DMP), Digital Media Renders (DMR) and Digital Media Controllers (DMC) allowing Pictures, Music and Video to be shared instantly at any time at home. All DLNA Certified Devices are capable of streaming content instantly from this NAS.

You can share files over the internet if you wanted to, and the list goes on and on. Keep in mind though that everything on this box is targeted at consumers and small business users (SOHO). Though you can access the WEB directory and make your own website, control and configuration over say the MySQL server we do warn you to take security measures. Make sure you secure your public files with proper Unix/Linux permissions. Thus at least a CHMOD 755 on Directories and preferable 644 on files. You can login to the box through SSH. The application list you can use on this machine is ginormous, albeit the Beta 3 software of Thecus OS feels limied in the number of apps available. A fun feature is the HDMI connector and thus HD television compatibility. You can connect this NAS directly towards an HDTV, Full HD 1080P  (60Hz) will be supported. From there onward just connect a keyboard and mouse to the NAS USB Port and in the home screen you can access the admin interface of this NAS. Obviously XBMC is your choice of weaponry here.  Unfortunately our Beta Firmware did not support this just yet, hence we could not test it. 

Energy Efficiency

We tested performance on this unit with an SSD  (so that we are certain that the storage unit can never be a bottleneck in terms of measuring storage performance. This SSD uses roughly 3.5 Watts. The traditional HDD these days uses roughly 5 to 8 Watts. But power consumption with an 8TB HDD. If you'd use one 8TB HDD for example, this unit would still hover in or at the 20 Watt range under full load with one HDD, an reasonable number TBH. That said in idle and low usage circumstances the NAS unit uses roughly 15 Watt. We assume you will add at least two HDDs thus add another 7 Watts. However, if your HDD is not used for say 30 minutes (or your own configured sleep time), it'll go into sleep mode and thus does not use any extravagant power (5W). We have to admit that this NAS unit is energy efficient. Especially considering the performance and server like applications it houses. It would be nice though to see another 5 Watts shaved off.

Final words and verdict

I know I keep mentioning this, but we tested the Thecus N5810 with non-public Beta software. The beta software will become the end product called ThecusOS 3, and that new software is going to make all the difference. See Revision 2 looks and feels old and outdated and it cannot compete with the QNAPs and ASUSTORs out there. With ThecusOS 7.0 things will change for the better (bigtime), it's a 360 degree turnarround really. It however is not yet finished or our for public, but starting with the old software and migrating to the new one in 2016 is merely a simple firmware update. Definitely be on the lookout for that. A NAS is not just a file-server anymore, these are fully fledged file serving servers with a plethora of applications and functionality. The Thecus N5810 with the new updated software definitely will be one of the more versatile NAS units available on the market. We like what we saw for hardware, software and functionality. The overall performance is really good, it is Gigabyte Ethernet compatible. At a 500 EURO/USD marker it is not cheap though we feel the price is fair for what you get, and you are receiving a SOHO server. Right, the Thecus N5810 we can recommend for the SOHO and consumer side of the market, it is an incredibly fun and handy NAS with excellent performance and extensive features that you may expect from a NAS unit anno 2015/2016, and the ThecusOS 7 firmware build 3.x.x will make all the difference. If Thecus can add many apps like Kodi/NXBGet/Couchpotato properly supported then this product in combo with the new ThecusOS 7.0 firmware will be a hit. Based on that new OS software it earns our Storage Sweetness award.

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