Thecus 5200Pro + 5x1TB Hitachi's

shauna · **19th July 2007, 03:14 PM**

I've ordered a Thecus 5200Pro - 5 drive NAS, supports raid, iscsi, etc + 5 Hitachi 1TB drives and I'm going to build a 4 TB raid server for my home network. I'll be using iscsi for HD recoding from my htpc PVR running snapstream and also running slimserver software on the NAS for audio distribution.

Any interest in a detailed review ?

I expect the HW to arrive next week.

aswigon · **19th July 2007, 05:44 PM**

Yes I would be interested to hear how you go with this and how much it ends up costing you overall.

slimf · **20th July 2007, 11:06 AM**

Hi

I would be very interested - It will be good to see how general responsivness of the system is when recording and playing back from an IP connected drive.

Assuming you run gigabit ethernet it *should* be good - I hate any kind of lag, as it ruins the user experience in MCE.. So I hope its fast.

Im getting the Thecus 5200 as well but I wasnt going to go for the Pro option.. Maybe I should.

peedon · **24th July 2007, 12:23 PM**

I would be very interested to hear how you get on. This is my next, next project...

Cheers!

slimf · **24th July 2007, 12:29 PM**

I have actually now ordered the 5200NB Pro (this is the model with the 4 gigabit switch built in)

Ive also ordered three 750gig drives for it (I will raid 5 them)

Waiting for delivery.

Damoo · **25th July 2007, 12:12 AM**

Bookmarked, please tell us how this works out for you!

shauna · **25th July 2007, 02:35 PM**

So

I've order the Thecus 5200Pro from Price Point for $1,120. They said they had it in stock which turned out to be wrong. Promised delivery for last thursday, missed and are now promising delivery today.

I 've ordered the 5x1TB disks from another vendor. They tell they are seeing over 30% returned failed drives and are waiting for another batch in 10 days. I expect to be paying about $ 500 per drive.

I am finding it very frustrating, but both the 5200Pro and the 1TB drives are fairly new and are therefore difficult to source.

So I expected to be assembling the unit in about 2 weeks. Please be paitent.

regards
shaun

slimf · **25th July 2007, 02:46 PM**

Hi Shaun

The failure rate is scary - Do yourself a favour and if at all possible purchase drives from DIFFERENT manufacturers..
Getting 5 identical drives, from the same batch/manufacturer will leave you susceptible to multiple drive failures which *may* occur around the same time.

With a 5 drive n-1 raid, 2 of 5 would need to fail at the same time before you loose data -but with identical batch drives, the chances of this happening is much higher than using drives from different manufacturers. (different manufacturing processes etc mean the drives have nothing in common - which is what you want in a redundant system)

I have purchased two Seagate and one WD drive for now (750gig each), and will try to source two other brands to make up the 5 drives when I can afford it.

I just hope the Thecus I have on order gets here in a reasonable amount of time as well!

shauna · **25th July 2007, 02:51 PM**

David,

I have been thing of excatly of what you suggested. A 2 drive failure means on loose 4TB of data (5x1TB raid 5 gives me 4TB available). I don't want to go to raid 6 and loose anothe TB of space.

I will be backing up some of the raid data, to an external disk, but probably only about 500MB.

So I guess I should get a couple of Hitachi 1TB and a couple of Samsungs and Segates.

Is anyone aware of other 1TB drives available apart from the Hitachi ?.

shaun

slimf · **25th July 2007, 02:55 PM**

Yeah - no one wants to loose 4TB!

I will have a backup solution as well - but it wont be for all the data - I will just backup family photos and business/personal documents... The rest (downloaded movies/tv shows etc) are not as important