Since the swap over to my new 4U storage server ZION it has already had a number of upgrades and I have used it quite heavily. My old N5550’s now all sit unused. In this post I will cover the updates to Zion 4U storage server and my Synology NAS 1817+.
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Thecus N5550 6th Drive Mod
This post is specific to owners of the Thecus N5550 but will apply to almost all of the Thecus NAS lineup as well. Anyone with Thecus NAS devices knows that the operating system “ThecusOS” has been practically abandoned. The vendor came out with “OS7” but it never fully finished and development died somewhere along the way. It also did not fully support the N5550 and many other models. Owners were left with unsupported devices.
This was fine with me for a while since I never really used the management interface except when configuring or troubleshooting issues. However after a couple years now the interface is very outdated and I was looking for something more modern.
I did upgrade one of my N5550’s to “ThecusOS7”, a beta version. It was able to install and it appeared to be functional however I was unable to create a RAID volume. Which means I could not use it for much of anything. Not to mention it was clunky and the older UI actually seemed to be more functional. It was clear that OS7 was just trying to mimic Synology’s DSM, but lacked all the polish. My attempts to downgrade were unsuccessful and I had pretty much bricked the NAS.
So now what? I have three N5550’s and don’t want the hardware to go to waste.
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This week NAS3 got a storage upgrade from 128GB SSD’s to 500GB SSDs. NAS3 is my SSD NAS which is used for hosting virtual machines.
NAS3 has been running with the 128GB SSD’s for many years now. In fact I paid more for the 128GB SSD than I did for the 500GB SSD. However that was exactly my reasoning for waiting so long to upgrade. NAS3 is not intended to be a performance beast since it’s limited to 1Gbps networking. It would literally be a waste to use high end SSDs in this machine.
Choosing an SSD is sometimes a difficult decision. You have to weigh the performance, cost, and endurance (quality) of the drive. Especially so in a NAS or RAID environment where SSD’s “total bytes written” or “TBW” endurance rating will become a factor.
I paid $90/each CDN for five Crucial MX500 500GB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD – CT500MX500SSD1(Z).
I don’t like using a parity RAID with SSD’s because you will wear them out faster, but in this case I simply don’t care. I would rather have a little redundancy with the trade off of a faster wear rate. Considering the old 128GB SSD’s have been running in RAID5 for many years now as well, from my experience it’s not a big issue.
In RAID5 the disks give me 1.81 TB of usable SSD space. Compared to about 477 GB before. So big upgrade in comparison.
This upgrade should last a few years at least. The next storage upgrade for the SSD side will be getting rid of the ancient Thecus N5550’s and replacing them with a Synology NAS. But that’s a future wish-list.
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