Performance:

So how else do I say this except “damn that’s fast!” 96MB/s sustained transfers!  During some transfers I was hitting peaks of 100 even 105MB/s. Gigabit Ethernet has a theoretical max transfer rate of 125MB/s, which will never be possible because of overhead. I can’t image anything getting much more than 110MB/s. There is an updated version of the 7700 that can have a “10GB Ethernet” upgrade, and the reported maximum speeds are 300MB/s… How’s that for getting it done quick.

On bootup

Setup

Halfway

Error recovery:

So something happened during testing that has never happened during a review. I had not one, but TWO drives fail (thankfully not at the same time!). At 3am, one of those nice big 1.5TB western digital drives decided it was time to kick the bucket. Previously, every time I wanted to test a failing drive, I had to put out a perfectly good one while the NAS was running. I will say the alarm the N7700 uses is more than enough to wake someone up in the next room… that and confuse the hell out of you because you have never heard it before and have absolutely no idea what is going on… because it’s flippin 3am!

Power Supply

Rear fans

Open back

I’m not sure what caused the failure of the drive at that time, if the NAS was just doing a quick diagnostic, or maybe another computer on the network asked for something, but either way the alarm went off. It kept going until I hit a button on the front panel. It was after that point I realized you can disable the alarm in the settings, and unless you really need it to sound off, I would recommend doing so. All of the alerts and emails I had setup worked, and I received an email telling me that the drive in “Bay 3” had failed. After testing the drive with Western Digital software, it reported the drive as having too many sector errors.

Motherboard

Sleds removed

Closer view

After replacing the drive, the N7700 automatically started rebuilding the array. All the while, the data was still live and accessible. Though I don’t recommend doing anything while it is rebuilding, the speeds are understandably slow. The whole rebuild took about 4 hours.

The 2^nd drive failure has been somewhat more of a problem, not because of Thecus, but because Western Digital has been very slow in getting a replacement drive shipped out. It is going on almost 3 and a-half weeks since the RMA. I had access to a spare 1.5TB drive once the first one died, but had nothing on hand when the second went. So I am still waiting to finish some of my tests.

Specifically I will be testing out the transfer speeds between 2 7700’s. I happen to have a friend who already has one, so I will be doing an update once the replacement drive has arrived. Though I’m not expecting anything different from the standard nsync procedure between the two 5200’s I’ve used before.

Conclusion:

LED's

Testing

Lots of drives!

    Once again I will say I’m impressed with the N7700. The speeds alone are enough to make this a “must have”. There are features I don’t need, features I can’t use fully, and features I can’t test. Those features of course will be very handy, if not required by some users, so your mileage may vary. But for reliability, speed, ease of use and features, it’s incredibly hard to beat Thecus’s high end NAS units.

Thecus has very much changed the way I setup all the computers on my network. Instead of worrying about the capacity of every computer, having a RAID5 setup on each one, now all my machines are setup with only two drives (High performance OS/Programs and a Pagefile/working drive) with regular backups scheduled. I had already spent time converting my commonly used CD/DVD's into image files that I would mount over the network, having the N7700 mount them has removed the requirement for 3rd party software on all my machines.

My experience with the two drive failures has made me think about one thing however. The more drives you have, the higher the chance of having two drives fail at the same time. Even if that chance is still remote. I had two drives fail within 2 weeks of each other. And while you could chose to use RAID6, to allow two drives to fail and still retain all data, it can get very expensive. I would recommend always having at least one extra drive on hand should one fail.

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