Thecus N5500 5 Bay NAS Server Review

Benchmarking the Thecus N5500

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO is one of the oldest hard drive benchmarks that is still used today. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that you can easily interpret. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes with the total length being 256mb.

The Thecus N5500 with the Western Digital Caviar Green drives was able to hit a max of 117MB/s read and a max of almost 95MB/s write.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds.

With Crystal Disk Mark the sequential read and writes topped out at 84.66 MB/s read, and 88.54MB/s write.

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 such as 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 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.

Intel warns that using more than 2GB of RAM will skew the test results. So I removed the 16GB Corsair Vengeance kits and replaced it with a single 2GB stick of Kingston HyperX for this test.