Open letter to Thecus N5200 - READ before you buy!
I sent this email to Thecus support, will let you know if they get back to me:
Dear Thecus Support
I purchased your N5200 model after reading a positive review of it on Hexus.net. My requirements are as a home user, backing up my DVDs and storing HD content. I would also like to add that I'm a software engineer by profession, so have a good understanding of technical details and user interaction. I purchased the product for 805€ from nwkomp.de.
I would also like to make clear I will be posting this email on the relevant newsgroups and comments on reviews. I feel I owe it to other potential buyers. To be fair, I will also post any response from Thecus - so I hope it is a good response.
I received this item today (after a 2-week delay from the supplier), and I have to say I'm disappointed. I would appreciate a point by point response to the following:
1) Firstly, overall documentation is pretty bad - apart from basic grammatical and spelling errors, it's not actually very informative. As one example, out of many, the details regarding "user percentage" is very unclear.
2) Even the device itself, on the LCD, has spelling errors. It says 'formattin' instead of 'formatting', even though there are clearly several cells left on the display. Either someone noticed it and couldn't be bother to do anything about it, or simply didn't notice after, presumably, months of development. I am not sure which is worse. This single issue is not a great problem in itself, but I do think it indicates the quality of your products is less than great.
3) Here's a big qualm: Why does it take five hours to format 5 250Gb drives? Can this not be done in parallel? If it is done in parallel, that's even more shocking. This is supposedly in 'rebuild speed:high' mode - I shudder to think how long 'low' takes.
4) Here's the biggie that prompted this rant: Clicking 'remove' on the RAID page does exactly that. What it DOESN'T do is WARN you, or give you a second chance!!! That's it - BOOM, data gone. That sounds like a schoolboy error to me - one of the first rules of software interfaces is to protect the user. Fortunately, it IS what I wanted to do, but it could easily not be in the future, and I'd be VERY wary of even viewing that page, for fear of accidentally clicking the button, or pressing return with the button highlighted... Of course, its taking ANOTHER 5 hours to build the array - surely not... Thought I'd take the time to write this while it's chugging along.
5) The reason I chose to remove the RAID array was because there is NO WAY to change the percentages of Snaptshot and USB allocations. (By the way, to allow only specification by percentage is plain lazy. Why not absolute values? I think a lot of users would want a less that 1% amount dedicated to USB for instance, say enough for a 4gb card). Why can't you just have a special folder, which can vary in size like any other folder?
6) (This list is getting really quite long for a product I've not even finished setting up) The documentation clearly states that the red LEDs indicate a problem, and yet, from what I can gather from using the N5200, they are also red during formatting, except the top one, which is green. Explaining properly to the user what to expect during different states is again another basic error.
7) The web interface does not contain any context sensitive help! How easy would it be to put a little question mark icon, or something similar, that one could click to see what that particular item does?
8) The 'snapshot' item in the menu does nothing when I click on it (after I'd setup the RAID array the first time, and the system was reporting 'healthy')
9) Whomever wrote the content for the web interface does not appear to have had knowledge of the past tense in English. Again, not a great problem, but it's very irritating to see so many errors on a product I have spent so much on.
10) The 'status' column on the disk information page contains only the text 'OK?'. I click that to see nothing but 'N/A' for all the so-called SMART INFO.
11) Generally, the options and information all seems very limited. For a product of this expense I would expect to see far more information on the component disks, and generally spped and transfer amounts and rates.
12) The fan is really rather noisy. There is not need for that level of noise in such a small product. I know there will probably be some stock excuse, but to me in seems like poor engineering, considering the availabilty of quiet fans, and the fact that hard drives don't really need a great deal of cooling.
13) My main two reasons for purchasing this product, rather than building my own with a Linux distribution, is the small form factor of the case, and the plug and play aspect. In the first aspect, I am pleased - it's a reasonably compact unit, and is well presented. On the later though, I am really very disappointed, Sloppy documention, sloppy web interface, excruciatingly slow RAID setup, and just a general lack of confidence in keeping my data on the device, once I finally get it set up.
Yours disappointed
Marcos Scriven
RAID init always take a long time
Quote:
Originally Posted by
marcosscriven
3) Here's a big qualm: Why does it take five hours to format 5 250Gb drives? Can this not be done in parallel? If it is done in parallel, that's even more shocking. This is supposedly in 'rebuild speed:high' mode - I shudder to think how long 'low' takes.
Marcos Scriven
In my personal and professional experience, raid initialization always takes quite a long time. For instance, on Netapp NAS units, you must first zero all drives, then build the disk array, each operation taking from between 2 to 3 hours to complete. I have also experienced really long build/format times with both software raid configuration and consumer grade hardware raid cards.
RAID init is quite a bit more complicated than a single disk format which is probably why it takes so much longer.
AFP authentication not working :(
I just got my Thecus 5200 and am very frustration first because it doesn\'t support AT ALL Barracuda 7200.9 hard drives which just so happened to be the drives I wanted to use in it.
Second, it don\'t authenticate over AFP. public shared folders work find, but as soon as you try to authenticated for an ACL\'s share, nothing works. I had to update the firmware just to get it to enable AFP support and now this. SMB share will work for now, but still sucks I can\'t get AFP support for my mac over the network.