Testing:

I know Thecus wants the N299 to be a low end, budget product, but I was still very disappointed with the speed results during testing. I never broke 7MB/sec. It's one thing if the performance was 80%, even 50% of a higher end product, but 7MB/s? I reviewed Synology's DS107+, which can be found for around the same price but the big difference between the two is the 107+ has a single drive slot instead of 2 on the N299. Yet it manages over 5X the speed (39MB/s) of the N299.

Doing a search of the community forums, it's very easy to see that I am not having a "one off" issue with my review unit. The general theory is that the CPU just can not handle the load when transferring data. The speeds are what I would expect from a 100 BaseT connection, not a Gigabit setup. Which is unfortunately where most of the complaints are directed by the end users. Thecus chose to advertise gigabit Ethernet on the N299, and that generally gives people a level of expectation, and they don't come anywhere close. So bottom line is the product itself is great, but the speeds are way slower than expected Gigabit.

Raid and File system:

The N299 has 3 RAID settings, 1, 0 and JBOD. There is no point to using RAID 0, as the speed of the N299 is already FAR more limited than a single drive can do, so adding the extra risk and calculations of RAID 0 just don't make sense. Basically it is your choice of 'Just a bunch of disks' and Raid 1. Of course if you are backing up important data, use Raid 1 to ensure the extra reliability.

2X 500GB

Cage reinstalled

Online

I don't know what format the N299 uses for it's own file system, but that really doesn't matter. Compatibility between OSX and Windows is the same as their other networked devices. Speeds for both systems are identical, and the method you use to access the files is just up to your own preference (FTP, Windows SMB, Appletalk etc)

Final thoughts:

Thecus N299

If I was looking at the N299 with a clean slate, and there was no issue with the speed, I would give it very high marks. The only place it would really lose any marks at all is the quality of the start page.

The features list is on par, if not above most other network access servers. I could overlook the lack of decent speeds if it wasn't for the fact that, not only was I led to believe the speeds would be better (why else would they say it has gigabit Ethernet?), but that there are other units with not only similar features, but also similar prices.

If Thecus could release an update that increases the speeds (even just a little), this would be one of the best value NAS setups available. For now though, a difference of 7MB/s to 30MB/s is just far too large to ignore, especially for anyone dealing with large files. I am expecting a firmware update any day now (I would have liked to have it before posting this review), and I will download it as soon as it is released. So expect an update to this review as soon as possible, and I'll let everyone know what it fixes, changes, wrecks, etc.

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