Performance

In order to put the Thecus N5550 to the test we used the Intel NAS Performance toolkit to test the over the network transfer speeds of the N5550 in multiple situations. I ran through the same tests with just a single drive as well as with all three of the Western Digital RED drives running in RAID 0. To get comparison results we tossed in results from a Qnap NAS and Seagate NAS that we had sitting around. The Qnap is running two 3tb Seagate hard drives in RAID 0 and the Seagate has 4 2tb drives in RAID 5. These results won’t compare directly with the Thecus due to using different drives, but it will give you a rough idea.

As you can see right away, both Thecus N5550 results stand out from the rest. The difference between the single disc performance and the three disc RAID 0 isn’t large on the N5550, but you do see a boost in everything but HD Playback and record. On some tests like the Photo Album benchmark the difference was less than a half MB/s. When compared to the Qnap drive, the difference is clear. In everything but the HD Video Playback benchmark the single disc results outperformed the RAID 0 in the Qnap. The Seagate results were out of the running from the start; running a RAID 5 means backing up every file on the fly slowing things down considerably. All in all, it’s clear that the Atom processor and 2 gigs of ram give the N5550 an advantage. As we mentioned before, the Western Digital RED drives are quick, but shouldn’t be able to outperform drives with a higher spindle speed. When you take that into account, the results are even more impressive.