Thecus N5200BR NAS Server Review with 5 drives in RAID 6

FTP Upload and Download Testing

The previous page of synthetic benchmarks looks great and makes it easy to compare performance, but what about real world testing? For this, I downloaded the latest version of WinSCP (v4.1.6) and transferred some game demos from a client system to the Thecus N5200BR server.

I uploaded the game demos Devil May Cry 4 and Race Driver: GRID to the Thecus N5200BR and noted that the upload speeds topped out at around 33Mbps to 34Mbps, which isn’t too shabby.

Once the files were uploaded to the network attached storage server, I then downloaded them to a new location on the client machine. The download speed was quicker and the top speed seen was 46Mbps during the download.

The last test I want to run on the Thecus N5200BR is the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit Exerciser. The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit is a file system exerciser and analysis tool designed to enable performance comparisons between network attached storage (NAS) devices. Intel NASPT focuses on user level performance using real world workload traces gathered from typical digital home applications: HD video playback and record, data backup and restore utilities, office productivity applications, video rendering/content creation and more. Intel NASPT reproduces the file system traffic observed in these traces onto whatever storage solution the user provides, records the system response, and reports a rich variety of performance information. The end result is readily comparable performance measurements that are useful to developers as well as intuitive and compelling to consumers.

The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit is one of the only benchmarks that I am aware of that was designed from the ground up just to measure NAS performance. The benchmark tests 18 different test scenarios to give you a great overall idea of how the NAS performs.