Thecus N5550 5-Bay NAS Review

When testing a device of this sort, the system that we use to test with is not a major factor in its performance. The performance of the NAS box comes down to the network its running on and its own internal hardware. With a device of this sort having so many different applications, Intel’s NASPT software covers all the bases and also gives us a set of results that we will be able to utilise and therefore give a benchmark against other similar systems in the future.

Intel NASPT (Network Attached Storage Performance Toolkit) performs its test by transferring varying sizes and quantities of data to and from the device based on twelve different scenarios.

To eliminate any bottlenecks that would occur during testing on our gigabit switch, we bridge the LAN connections on one of our test benches and connect the NAS box into the secondary LAN isolating it from the main network and giving it the most bandwidth we can.

The system that we use to run the Intel NASPT software does require us to drop the memory right down to 2GB as any more than this leads to data caching and therefore skews the results from the NAS box.

Following on from this we test the NAS box performance under each of the RAID options that it has available, to show, depending on the end users needs, the relational differences in speed from the drive and thus one can decide which particular RAID configuration will be best for them.