Software:

Discovery	DHCP setup	Login screen
Drive list	Raid setup	Size limit
Formatting	Completed	WD drive info

Setup & Installation:

   So there is the elephant in the room of cost these days. And for the foreseeable future, those 2TB drives needed to get 14TB are going to be too expensive for most small businesses and end users. Finding the balance of drive size and cost is a personal choice, but for my own tests I went with 7 1.5TB Western digital cavilers. The drives are not quite the cheapest per GB, however they give a generous 8+TB formatted raid5 array. (Remember, with Raid5, the size of an array is one drive less than the number of drives used, so 6*1.5GB= 9.0GB, then you will lose another 5% or so after formatting)

7 Drives

1.5TB goodness

Sleds

Getting the n7700 setup is exactly the same as the previous models. Screw each drive into the sled and slide it into one of the slots. Then just plug in the power and network cables. Like the other models, the N7700 has an internal power supply and doesn’t require any special cables or power bricks.

The internal bits are stacked inside cleanly. The CPU is a dual core intel Celeron with 2GB of ram. There is PCI-E expansion slot, not that I can find out why. Though I suppose if someone was really ambitious and managed to put their own OS on, they would have access to any PCI-E 1X hardware, Thecus doesn’t seem to support them.

Side panel removed

Door alarm

Front door

The firmware running the N7700 is the same as the 5200, but the last 2 years has seen many updates to add new features. The features list is verging on ridiculous in length, though the list of extra modules you can add has not grown as much as I had expected. There are web server, and MySQL modules that gives it functionality many other NAS servers have by default. I think Thecus was hoping for more community driven modules to have compatibility between the N5200 and N7700.

One of the most interesting features that has been added is USB Raid Encryption. In the news there has been all sorts of articles about computer thefts and the loss of sensitive personal data in the last few years. Encrypting the raid array does has a performance hit, as every time data is read/written to the array it must be decrypted/encrypted. The “key” to the encryption is stored on a USB memory stick that must be connected to allow access to the drives. You can backup the key to other memory sticks which is recommended by Thecus, because without the stick connected, there is –no- way to get any of your data. For my own data, I would prefer someone else getting their hands on it, over losing it. So I obviously won’t be using this feature.

Left Panel

Side view

Back ports

With the size of drives I chose, I actually ran into a problem I didn’t expect. With the 5200, and most other NAS setups, the old standby ext-3 is the default file system used. The problem is, ext-3 is limited at an 8TB partition size (for most systems). So the 1.5TB drives I used would have to be split up into different partitions to continuing using it.

Thankfully the N7700 has 2 other options for partitioning the drives. XFS and ZFS. Both of these file systems have limits that can –never- be reached. Everyone knows the 64 bit systems today can access an amazing amount of data, hell it will be decades before we need to worry even with moores law. 16.8 million terabytes = 64 bits, and as the wiki says “ZFS is a 128-bit file system, so it can address 18 billion billion (1.84 × 1019) times more data than current 64-bit systems.” XFS has a similarly ridiculous limit.

Both of these file systems have been specifically designed to handle large files, and facilitate fast transfers. So how do they perform?

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