Possible alternatives to Thecus NAS firmware?

[darrenmackay]

Is it possible to use the N8800 as an eSATA enclosure?

What sata controller chip-set is used in the n8800? is it the Marvell 88se6340 (which is used in the n7700) or different?

Cheers,

Darren Mackay

[jarmstrong5]

i don't really know. not being an expert on this I was thinking just use the N8800 for power and plug the drives direct to a RAID card in the server. Maybe mount a sata multiplier of my own inside it so that I only have to run 1 or 2 sata cables to the box. Is this a crazy idea?

[mishav]

Regarding the N2200, I managed to create a user module to submit root commands, so you dont really need the serial cable linkup. Uploaded to thecus.nas-central.org
Also at that site some guys are replacing Thecus firmware, I'll be seeing if I can get this to work on the N2200 sometime this year hehe.

[DoctorSAN]

Is it possible to use the N8800 as an eSATA enclosure? I've been thinking of just putting an eSATA RAID card in my server and getting an enclosure for the drives and using the N8800 as a doorstop. But then I thought, could I somehow disconnect the sata cables in the N800 from the motherboard and connect them back to an eSATA card? Thus bypassing all the Thecus firmware issues and using a well known hardware raid controller.

Actually, for those of us who are giving up on the hope of Thecus one day releasing firmware that is halfway competant, this drastic solution might be worth considering. You would be basically gutting the chassis, and might need to tinker with the power supply/power switch relationship to have it start up without use of the motherboard, but sure.. why not?

An 8 drive expansion chassis is better than landfill, right?

[rrnworks]

If you have ever used Qnap or Synology firmware, you will instantly see just how awful the Thecus firmware / gui is - it is really a joke and unbelievable. QNAP is actually quite nice. Learn from my mistake - don't buy Thecus - there are too many other better NAS devices out there nowadays.

[DoctorSAN]

If you have ever used Qnap or Synology firmware, you will instantly see just how awful the Thecus firmware / gui is - it is really a joke and unbelievable. QNAP is actually quite nice. Learn from my mistake - don't buy Thecus - there are too many other better NAS devices out there nowadays.

Word.

Don't forget Infortrend or Dell. Both have storage products approaching this price point with a much less creative understanding of the word 'enterprise'.

[rhumba]

If you have ever used Qnap or Synology firmware, you will instantly see just how awful the Thecus firmware / gui is - it is really a joke and unbelievable. QNAP is actually quite nice. Learn from my mistake - don't buy Thecus - there are too many other better NAS devices out there nowadays.

We had an episode last weekend where the cooling unit on the roof went out and the on-call support guy didn't missed all the pages going off at five minutes interval! As a result, two of my three N7700 died. Why not the third one? Because it was running with 7 x Seagate 2TB LP drives! There others were filled with the faster 7200RPM drives. At the time we purchase the 2TB drives, we treated the our N7700 with the LP drives as second-class. Well, look who won in the end. But we only speaking of drives.

Back to the NAS, we have four NAS from Fastora before the whole thing was sold to Synology. These are older ATA NAS boxes, but all of them survived the heat strike. These 'synology' boxes sent me a 'hot' message, then a 'very hot' message, then a 'graceful' shutdown. Wow!

Synology price is comparable to Thecus. I hope Thecus implement this feature in their future system or firmware releases or I won't be buying anything from them again.