Price : Too low to display
With the N7700PRO, blistering performance is the name of the game. At its core is an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and a whopping 4GB of high-speed DDR2 800 memory, making it the most powerful NAS unit available. In fact, with its PCI-e slot, the N7700PRO can reach data transfer speeds of over 300MB/s by adding a PCI-e 10Gb Ethernet adapter! All of this raw power easily manipulates large amounts of data – perfect for the N7700PRO’s seven 3.5” SATA drive bays that can accommodate up to 14TB of storage. Need even more storage at your disposal? With its stackable feature, you can connect up to five N7700PROs together and easily manage them all via a master unit. The N7700PRO is even compatible with iSCSI initiators and supports iSCSI thin provisioning for added performance and flexibility.
This review is from : Thecus N7700PRO 7-Bay Network Attached Storage
No Support . There is absolutely 0 support. I have had a case open for weeks in which I have never gotten an email or spoke to anyone besides the initial operator. I have the N7700 which had an issue being recognized via LAN connection. The initial call is logged, then you are told you will be placed on hold until a technician can assist - then after 10 minutes you will get disconnected and a technician will call you back. But guess what - 10 minutes go by, disconnected and no technicians ever call you back! I have called them 4 times and each time I explain what has happened the operator acts shocked and ensures me they will get the ball rolling. Eventually I figured out the problem myself. I think my case is still open. added two more stars due to product functioning as it should.
No Support . There is absolutely 0 support. I have had a case open for weeks in which I have never gotten an email or spoke to anyone besides the initial operator. I have the N7700 which had an issue being recognized via LAN connection. The initial call is logged, then you are told you will be placed on hold until a technician can assist - then after 10 minutes you will get disconnected and a technician will call you back. But guess what - 10 minutes go by, disconnected and no technicians ever call you back! I have called them 4 times and each time I explain what has happened the operator acts shocked and ensures me they will get the ball rolling. Eventually I figured out the problem myself. I think my case is still open. added two more stars due to product functioning as it should.
Thecus N7700PRO 7-Bay Network Attached Storage Reviews
Great value excellent performance for the price - very satistfied but one 'small' caveat for VMware iSCSI users . I saw the last two posts giving the device negative reviews/low stars mainly because of the poor technical support. While I believe that's more of an opinion of the company versus the actual product, I can certainly understand how responsive and helpful tech support can be the decision maker, especially if this is going to be a business purchase.That being said - I will focus mainly on the product itself since I have not had an opportunity to sample their support.First - a little background info on the environment so you can see where my viewpoint resides. I recently purchased two of these with 7x each 3TB Hitachi drives (the sweet 7200rpm/SATA3 drives). Both N7700s are connected to Netgear GSM7324 Layer 3 switches (LAN1 on one L3 switch, LAN2 on a separate L3 switch). For these tests, Jumbo Frames were not enabled. The goal is access via shared drive mapping but primarily for iSCSI access for my VMware vSphere environment; 4 VMware ESX hosts access the iSCSI targets on both N7700s. Storage is configured in RAID5 - about 16TB accessible space via EXT4 file system.Regarding the performance - considering these aren't SAS 15k Cheetah drives, I was very impressed with the speed. When moving VMs from the local DAS-storage (RAID1) to the N7700, I would consistently get about 80-100MB/s (megabyte/sec, not megabit). When moving datastores from one N7700 to the other N7700, I would see up to 120-130MB/s.Performance from workstation to shared drives was decent. Using Windows Explorer, I copied a DVD to a shared folder and got about 14MB/sec on average. The source was a 3TB USB 3.0 external drive; workstation is connected to a Netgear GSM7324 L3 gigabit switch also. However - when I used FTP (FileZilla with 10 concurrent sessions) I was able to get 28MB/sec consistently. That's more a bandwidth thing rather than raw speed, but you can see the difference when you use a more effcient protocol and concurrent connections. :)Power draw - I have a Kill-A-Watt Pro and with no drives in the unit, it draws about 38 watts. With one of those Hitachi drives, wattage went up to 46 watts (about 8 watts/drive; minimal load). With all 7 bays occupied and under full load, it draws about 100-120 watts. Not bad at all, considering a full fleged file server configured similarly would draw considerable more power for the same net storage space.Noise level - I do have a decibel meter but I didn't get any readings in a quiet environment to get any hard numbers. I can say subjectively though, that even with all 7 7200rpm drives that it's not very noticeable. I believe the two exhaust fans are the standard 120mm fans and make about as much noise as any others do. Heck the fans in those Netgear GSM7324 switches is at least 4x as loud as the N7700 fully loaded (honestly they are obscenely loud but I digress...) Depending on where you eventually place the unit, that may not even matter. If your intent is to place the N7700 next to your keyboard or someplace very close and you are easily annoyed, that might be a problem. But let's face it - if you're reading this and you're interested in a N7700, you're probably willing to live with a little noise for the amount of data storage you're getting...and likely have a better spot for it anyways. :)Lastly - I did mention a little caveat for VMware iSCSI users. I did spend many hours frustrated and confused as to what the heck was going on. Essentially my goal was to provide my vSphere environment with iSCSI targets from both N7700 devices. Seemed easy enough - create 2TB targets (VMware limit...damnit) on each device, then add the datastores to the environment. For simplicity's sake, I will call them Target 1A and Target 2A (device 1 and device 2). So you'd expect to be able to go to the VI client - scan for new storage (after iSCSI configuration) and be presented with two targets - one from each device. Well that's not what happened. What happened is I was presented with one target that contained two paths (as if multipathing was enabled). After much research and head banging, I found out that the problem lies in the way the N7700s create the target path. Even though you use unique names/LUNs/iqn info/etc, the N7700 is hard coded to use the same name during the iSCSI target full name generation. So when you create Target 1 on device 1 and then create Target 1 on device 2, if you break down the name that's created, you'll see one portion is identical - which is what VMware apparently uses to identify storage. And unfortunately, there is no way to edit this name that's been generated. VERY LAME!Thankfully there is a decent working, permanent solution. First - create all the iSCSI targets you want on the first device. For example, if you want 4 targets on device 1 and 4 targets on device 2 - you create the first four targets on device one. Then you create four 'bogus' targets on device 2. After the bogus targets are created, create your 'actual' targets, the ones you intend to keep. Once that's done - delete the 'bogus' targets. What that does is - eliminates the indentical name mapping off the second device, since by then, you will be on Targets 5-8 rather than 1-4. Sounds lame - but it definitely works and it stays working even through N7700 reboots and VMware host reboots. Other than that initial trick configuration - it will act as expected and all will be as expected.This is probably where the 'poor support' would come into play. Naturally once I randomly stumbled upon this problem and fix - I would have expected Thecus to address it with a firmware update. After all, this problem has existed for quite some time... I guess no one else uses more than one of these in an ESX environment?? Well their latest update, 5.01.05 was released in July of 2011. When someone contacted Thecus regarding this iSCSI target name duplication problem (and gave them the whole 'I thought you guys were VMware certified') bit, their response was 'well we are VMware certified for the N7700 but for NFS connection, not for iSCSI' and it appears their team isn't so focused on the N7700 on VMware iSCSI as their other, more enterprise-related products. Also - I want to state that this problem will only affect people that have more than one N7700 with intent on using it to add storage to their VMware environment using iSCSI. I have a feeling if you add iSCSI storage to say, a Windows workstation, this problem may not be an issue. But now that I have my environment set up to go to Production, I have no intent on messing around with my iSCSI configuration to find out if that's true or not. :)To sum up:PROS
- Great performance for the price. Consistently get 25MB/sec from workstation to N7700 using FTP; 14MB/sec using Windows Explorer. 80MB/sec to 120MB/sec on server to N7700 transfers and from N7700 to N7700 over gigabit ethernet (Dual NICs NOT bound together in these tests).
- Up to 21TB of storage using 3TB drives...pretty impressive
- Low power draw, even with all 7 bays in use with 7200rpm drives
- Fairly quiet for what it is. I have other networking equipment that makes much more noise than even 2x N7700s fully loaded running next to each other
- Seemingly low heat generation, but I don't have enough scientific data to say otherwise.
- Active Directory integration - great for using groups/users to manage the ACLs for folder security
- There is a decent workaround to the VMware issue so after initial configuration it's no longer an issue
- There are installable 'modules' which can make the N7700 even more productive. You get a built in Web Disk (web based file transfer, pretty cool and useful) and an online photo album. However when you think about it - what network admin in their right mind would publish the web admin login to the general user community? Just seems like a 'fun' feature, maybe for the admin team but definitely not something for the general user community or a serious enterprise. Thankfully - these can all be disabled.CONS
- iSCSI issue with VMware if more than one N7700 device is to be used in the environment; Thecus doesn't seem to be interested in updating their firmware to address it
- When creating/managing space, for some reason Thecus decided to only use percentage versus a hard coded number. Not a deal breaker but just a head scratcher.
- Support may be an issue; if this is a corporate/company purchase and good support is on the Must Have list, you may need to do some research and compare to other alternative providers. For personal use - I say the risk is probably worth it. Just keep your data backed up...because 21TB is just too much of a loss.I hope this review provided additional insight that the others didn't. And if nothing else, hopefully someone searching the Interwebs trying to fix their VMware iSCSI problem will discover my solution and have themselves a better day!
Great value excellent performance for the price - very satistfied but one 'small' caveat for VMware iSCSI users . I saw the last two posts giving the device negative reviews/low stars mainly because of the poor technical support. While I believe that's more of an opinion of the company versus the actual product, I can certainly understand how responsive and helpful tech support can be the decision maker, especially if this is going to be a business purchase.That being said - I will focus mainly on the product itself since I have not had an opportunity to sample their support.First - a little background info on the environment so you can see where my viewpoint resides. I recently purchased two of these with 7x each 3TB Hitachi drives (the sweet 7200rpm/SATA3 drives). Both N7700s are connected to Netgear GSM7324 Layer 3 switches (LAN1 on one L3 switch, LAN2 on a separate L3 switch). For these tests, Jumbo Frames were not enabled. The goal is access via shared drive mapping but primarily for iSCSI access for my VMware vSphere environment; 4 VMware ESX hosts access the iSCSI targets on both N7700s. Storage is configured in RAID5 - about 16TB accessible space via EXT4 file system.Regarding the performance - considering these aren't SAS 15k Cheetah drives, I was very impressed with the speed. When moving VMs from the local DAS-storage (RAID1) to the N7700, I would consistently get about 80-100MB/s (megabyte/sec, not megabit). When moving datastores from one N7700 to the other N7700, I would see up to 120-130MB/s.Performance from workstation to shared drives was decent. Using Windows Explorer, I copied a DVD to a shared folder and got about 14MB/sec on average. The source was a 3TB USB 3.0 external drive; workstation is connected to a Netgear GSM7324 L3 gigabit switch also. However - when I used FTP (FileZilla with 10 concurrent sessions) I was able to get 28MB/sec consistently. That's more a bandwidth thing rather than raw speed, but you can see the difference when you use a more effcient protocol and concurrent connections. :)Power draw - I have a Kill-A-Watt Pro and with no drives in the unit, it draws about 38 watts. With one of those Hitachi drives, wattage went up to 46 watts (about 8 watts/drive; minimal load). With all 7 bays occupied and under full load, it draws about 100-120 watts. Not bad at all, considering a full fleged file server configured similarly would draw considerable more power for the same net storage space.Noise level - I do have a decibel meter but I didn't get any readings in a quiet environment to get any hard numbers. I can say subjectively though, that even with all 7 7200rpm drives that it's not very noticeable. I believe the two exhaust fans are the standard 120mm fans and make about as much noise as any others do. Heck the fans in those Netgear GSM7324 switches is at least 4x as loud as the N7700 fully loaded (honestly they are obscenely loud but I digress...) Depending on where you eventually place the unit, that may not even matter. If your intent is to place the N7700 next to your keyboard or someplace very close and you are easily annoyed, that might be a problem. But let's face it - if you're reading this and you're interested in a N7700, you're probably willing to live with a little noise for the amount of data storage you're getting...and likely have a better spot for it anyways. :)Lastly - I did mention a little caveat for VMware iSCSI users. I did spend many hours frustrated and confused as to what the heck was going on. Essentially my goal was to provide my vSphere environment with iSCSI targets from both N7700 devices. Seemed easy enough - create 2TB targets (VMware limit...damnit) on each device, then add the datastores to the environment. For simplicity's sake, I will call them Target 1A and Target 2A (device 1 and device 2). So you'd expect to be able to go to the VI client - scan for new storage (after iSCSI configuration) and be presented with two targets - one from each device. Well that's not what happened. What happened is I was presented with one target that contained two paths (as if multipathing was enabled). After much research and head banging, I found out that the problem lies in the way the N7700s create the target path. Even though you use unique names/LUNs/iqn info/etc, the N7700 is hard coded to use the same name during the iSCSI target full name generation. So when you create Target 1 on device 1 and then create Target 1 on device 2, if you break down the name that's created, you'll see one portion is identical - which is what VMware apparently uses to identify storage. And unfortunately, there is no way to edit this name that's been generated. VERY LAME!Thankfully there is a decent working, permanent solution. First - create all the iSCSI targets you want on the first device. For example, if you want 4 targets on device 1 and 4 targets on device 2 - you create the first four targets on device one. Then you create four 'bogus' targets on device 2. After the bogus targets are created, create your 'actual' targets, the ones you intend to keep. Once that's done - delete the 'bogus' targets. What that does is - eliminates the indentical name mapping off the second device, since by then, you will be on Targets 5-8 rather than 1-4. Sounds lame - but it definitely works and it stays working even through N7700 reboots and VMware host reboots. Other than that initial trick configuration - it will act as expected and all will be as expected.This is probably where the 'poor support' would come into play. Naturally once I randomly stumbled upon this problem and fix - I would have expected Thecus to address it with a firmware update. After all, this problem has existed for quite some time... I guess no one else uses more than one of these in an ESX environment?? Well their latest update, 5.01.05 was released in July of 2011. When someone contacted Thecus regarding this iSCSI target name duplication problem (and gave them the whole 'I thought you guys were VMware certified') bit, their response was 'well we are VMware certified for the N7700 but for NFS connection, not for iSCSI' and it appears their team isn't so focused on the N7700 on VMware iSCSI as their other, more enterprise-related products. Also - I want to state that this problem will only affect people that have more than one N7700 with intent on using it to add storage to their VMware environment using iSCSI. I have a feeling if you add iSCSI storage to say, a Windows workstation, this problem may not be an issue. But now that I have my environment set up to go to Production, I have no intent on messing around with my iSCSI configuration to find out if that's true or not. :)To sum up:PROS
- Great performance for the price. Consistently get 25MB/sec from workstation to N7700 using FTP; 14MB/sec using Windows Explorer. 80MB/sec to 120MB/sec on server to N7700 transfers and from N7700 to N7700 over gigabit ethernet (Dual NICs NOT bound together in these tests).
- Up to 21TB of storage using 3TB drives...pretty impressive
- Low power draw, even with all 7 bays in use with 7200rpm drives
- Fairly quiet for what it is. I have other networking equipment that makes much more noise than even 2x N7700s fully loaded running next to each other
- Seemingly low heat generation, but I don't have enough scientific data to say otherwise.
- Active Directory integration - great for using groups/users to manage the ACLs for folder security
- There is a decent workaround to the VMware issue so after initial configuration it's no longer an issue
- There are installable 'modules' which can make the N7700 even more productive. You get a built in Web Disk (web based file transfer, pretty cool and useful) and an online photo album. However when you think about it - what network admin in their right mind would publish the web admin login to the general user community? Just seems like a 'fun' feature, maybe for the admin team but definitely not something for the general user community or a serious enterprise. Thankfully - these can all be disabled.CONS
- iSCSI issue with VMware if more than one N7700 device is to be used in the environment; Thecus doesn't seem to be interested in updating their firmware to address it
- When creating/managing space, for some reason Thecus decided to only use percentage versus a hard coded number. Not a deal breaker but just a head scratcher.
- Support may be an issue; if this is a corporate/company purchase and good support is on the Must Have list, you may need to do some research and compare to other alternative providers. For personal use - I say the risk is probably worth it. Just keep your data backed up...because 21TB is just too much of a loss.I hope this review provided additional insight that the others didn't. And if nothing else, hopefully someone searching the Interwebs trying to fix their VMware iSCSI problem will discover my solution and have themselves a better day!
Thecus N7700PRO 7-Bay Network Attached Storage Opinions
Very Satisfied - Good Value . I logged on to buy my sixth N7700Pro and saw the negative reviews. I like Thecus products and thought I should balance out the reviews with my positive experiences. In addition to the N7700's I also have five N5200Pro's that have been in service 24/7 for over 5 years.
Although I agree that Thecus tech support is practically non-existent, I have to say that based on my experience there is a very slim chance that you will ever need it. In the same time frame that I have owned Thecus products, I had two other popular brands of NAS fail. The others had good tech support, but they ultimately told me their units were never designed to be repaired and that they did not even have a repair facility.
I like the fact that Thecus continues to provide support for their older products. The older N5200's continue to benefit from firmware upgrades and larger hard drives.
My most recent build is a N7700Pro 18TB video server. I have seen continuous and flawless transfer speeds of up to 80MB/sec. from my PC to the N7700 Pro NAS.
I would highly recommend the N7700Pro for any small business or as a home video server. My business data archive goes back to 1992, so I have a lot to loose if I don't have reliable data backup. If I were the IT guy at a Fortune 500 company I would still test the Thecus products, but would probably look for another NAS solution at three times the cost.
Very Satisfied - Good Value . I logged on to buy my sixth N7700Pro and saw the negative reviews. I like Thecus products and thought I should balance out the reviews with my positive experiences. In addition to the N7700's I also have five N5200Pro's that have been in service 24/7 for over 5 years.
Although I agree that Thecus tech support is practically non-existent, I have to say that based on my experience there is a very slim chance that you will ever need it. In the same time frame that I have owned Thecus products, I had two other popular brands of NAS fail. The others had good tech support, but they ultimately told me their units were never designed to be repaired and that they did not even have a repair facility.
I like the fact that Thecus continues to provide support for their older products. The older N5200's continue to benefit from firmware upgrades and larger hard drives.
My most recent build is a N7700Pro 18TB video server. I have seen continuous and flawless transfer speeds of up to 80MB/sec. from my PC to the N7700 Pro NAS.
I would highly recommend the N7700Pro for any small business or as a home video server. My business data archive goes back to 1992, so I have a lot to loose if I don't have reliable data backup. If I were the IT guy at a Fortune 500 company I would still test the Thecus products, but would probably look for another NAS solution at three times the cost.
Cons Review
Not reliable not business class no support . I own this thecus for about year now and I had some trouble with it.
In a few words, let me just say that I'm very disappointed.
First of all, the english translations of the user interface and user guide are so bad (worse than MY english!!!) that it sometimes do not make any sense.
(try to download one and read the user manual to make your own opinion).
I miss a lot of UI feedback during some operations.
Comparing to other manufacturers, the web UI is crappy and lacks functionality.
The main issue I had with the Thecus N7700pro was when I tried to upgrade the firmware.
I had to update since the the ZFS file system kept reporting wrong used disk space (about 50x the actual size of a file for each file).
And given the huge press release when they published the firmware, I thought I really had to update it.
Guess what ?
After updating, the thecus could not be accessed anymore and stayed daylong stuck in some "self testing..."
I opened a ticket, and after 2 days I'm still waiting for an answer from the support team ...
I tested other brands like Qnap and Synology : they do much better!
PRO: the perf with ZFS and dual network link were not so bad.
In a few words, let me just say that I'm very disappointed.
First of all, the english translations of the user interface and user guide are so bad (worse than MY english!!!) that it sometimes do not make any sense.
(try to download one and read the user manual to make your own opinion).
I miss a lot of UI feedback during some operations.
Comparing to other manufacturers, the web UI is crappy and lacks functionality.
The main issue I had with the Thecus N7700pro was when I tried to upgrade the firmware.
I had to update since the the ZFS file system kept reporting wrong used disk space (about 50x the actual size of a file for each file).
And given the huge press release when they published the firmware, I thought I really had to update it.
Guess what ?
After updating, the thecus could not be accessed anymore and stayed daylong stuck in some "self testing..."
I opened a ticket, and after 2 days I'm still waiting for an answer from the support team ...
I tested other brands like Qnap and Synology : they do much better!
PRO: the perf with ZFS and dual network link were not so bad.
Inadequate . The interface for this NAS was very basic and lacked the response similar to my 5 year old Synology drive. There are not built in firewalls to protect your data. I had numerous problems transferring data which totals in the double digits of terabytes.
Product Image
Feature Thecus N7700PRO 7-Bay Network Attached Storage
- The N7700PRO offers unprecedented data performance, reaching speeds of over 300MB/s.
- Powered by an Intel Core? 2 Duo processor and featuring 4GB of high-speed DDR2 memory, the N7700PRO is the most powerful NAS unit on the market.
- With its PCI-e slot, the N7700PRO can accommodate a number of emerging technologies.
- The N7700PRO is equipped with a dual Disk On Module (DOM) design to ensure flawless operation and maximum uptime
- Add a 10Gb Ethernet adaptor and experience the lightning-fast file transfers.
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5-Bay Network Attached Storage 301511U
Product Details
EAN : 4712505091631UPC : 884956001638
MPN : 4712505091631
Brand : Thecus
Weight : 25 pounds
Height : 14 inches
Length : 18 inches
Width : 16 inches
Binding : Personal Computers
ItemPartNumber : N7700PRO
Manufacturer : Thecus
Model : N7700PRO
Platform : Mac OS X
Publisher : Thecus
SKU : D5S@DHN7700PRO
Studio : Thecus
Where To Buy
You can buy Thecus N7700PRO 7-Bay Network Attached Storage on Amazon . Click here to Read More
