Thecus N7700 Network Attached Storage Server

Name: Thecus N7700 NAS
Brand: Thecus

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, July 20, 2009, 11:07 AM EDT

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.

Tags: Storage, NAS, Network, LAN, Thecus, N7700

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com