1U4500R: my first impressions are not good.

[g8keepa82]

Recently purchased 4 x Thecus 1U4500R units for use in a corporate environment and have not been impressed at all. Here are just a few of my complaints...

1) Network connection on the "LAN" interface on one of the devices fails to autonegotiate to 1Gbs. We have tried several things including powering the unit off for 30 seconds and trying several other CAT6 cables (which negotiate to 1Gbs with other devices). This is by far the most concerning issue we currently have as this means that we cannot employ link aggregation for redundancy (802.3ad requires both links be at the same link speed). Is this a hardware issue or a issue that will be fixed by a firmware update? Anybody else with this issue?

2) It doesn't seem possible to be able to serve out 100% of the available disk as an iSCSI volume. It appears that best we can do is set up a 1% "User Data" RAID5 that can be served out as NFS or SMB. Then allocate 99% for iSCSI. This wouldn't be such a bad thing except that 1% of a 3TB RAID5 is almost 30GB! Is there a solution to this?

3) Deleting a lot of files from a SMB or NFS share takes an unacceptable amount of time while the Thecus CPU load sits at 100%. Such an operation shouldn't bring the device to its knees.

4) There are a LOT of bugs in the user interface. For example:

- The Network Settings pages are a good example. You set the "WAN" interface to 802.3ad mode assuming that this would disable the "LAN" interface and cause them to both act as one port. However after reboot you are still able to configure the "LAN" port.

- Status messages such as "WAN is being configurated (please don't stop the processing)" don't instill confidence.


Basically we are very very disappointed with these units. From a company that lists "Core values" such as innovation, quality and reliability on their homepage feel, these units feel like a joke at this stage. I would highly recommend anyone thinking about getting a Thecus NAS appliance to look elsewhere. Hopefully firmware revisions will fix these and what undoubtedly will be more issues with these.

[Thecus - Yvon]

Dear Sir,

We apologize for unpleasant experience you had in our produce.

1. According to your description, it seems that the motherboard have problem case fail auto negotiate issue, please contact with distributor request for replace the NAS unit.

2. I discussed with product leader and get positive response, there is space to improve the 1 percent limitation, and they agree to improve the limitaion, but due to develop team had lots of the tasks are ongoing, it might not be solve right away, they will depend on the issue serverity and assign the priority to the issue and arrange time to change behavior.

3. In some case from Widnows to delete and how long it took while deleting files, thus please provide us a approximate time and file number for us to reference and verify.

4. Thanks for your advices, we will inform develop team these issue, and improve this issue with new version firmware.