Thecus N7700 Network Attached Storage Server

To test the performance of the Thecus N7700 NAS Server, we used a combination of synthetic benchmark testing and real-world file copy tests. Throughout the tests, the N7700 was configured with a 6-drive RAID 5 array (the seventh drive was configured as a hot spare.

The environment in which the Thecus N7700 was tested consisted of a D-Link DGL-4500 broadband router, connected to a D-Link DGS-2208 Gigabit switch. Our test machines and the N7700 we all connected directly to the switch, which in turn is connected to the router. Our file transfer tests were conducted on a Core i7 920 powered machine, complete with 6GB of RAM, a Marvell Gigabit Ethernet controller, and Windows Vista Ultimate.

Before conducting any tests, the switch, N7700, and test machine were rebooted and anti-virus software was disabled.

Our first tests were conducted with the ATTO Disk Benchmark. We mapped drive letter X: to the test machine and ran the default ATTO test. As you can see, the N7700 performs best when block sizes reach the 32K mark and performance is exemplary with the larger files sizes. In fact, according to ATTO, the N7700 is capable of write speeds 115MB/s range and read speeds if about 110MB/s.

In our real world file copy tests, we copied a 4.5GB ISO to and from the N7700 in the large file transfer test and in the small file transfer test we copied a directory filled with hundreds of MP3 files. For reference we also ran the same tests on a couple of other NAS devices we had in the lab at the time.

The numbers show the Thecus N7700 offering huge performance advantages over the other NAS devices, but despite its excellent performance the N7700 never attained the speeds reported by the ATTO benchmark. Regardless, the N7700 is clearly an extremely fast network attached file storage device.