Hardware Specifications

If we look at all of the specifications all at once it gets a bit overwhelming, so we are going to break them down into two groups, hardware and software.

Here we see that the N7700 is designed to use seven hard drives and has an option to use an eighth via an eSATA port on the back. The unit features two gigabit ethernet ports that can be "teamed" with Link Aggregation to nearly double the throughput to the network.

The N7700 uses a genuine Intel Celeron processor and comes with one of its two memory slots filled. It is possible to add more DDR2 memory to the unit as you so desire, but as you will soon see the N7700 performs very well in the stock configuration.

As with all of the Thecus products we have looked at, Thecus is always improving upon their initial firmware release. It seems like every three to six months they update the products firmware and include new features. You can see the latest improvements to the software code on this page .

As far as the initial firmware that the N7700 has installed out of the box, it is pretty much flawless. We didn't have any issues at all and were surprised at first to see so many consumer friendly options available on this enterprise product. The multimedia options were carried over and improved upon from the N5200 and N5200 Pro; our test Playstation 3 recognized the N7700 right away and we were blasting tunes in the living room within minutes of setup.

Setup on many NAS servers has always been the Achilles heel , but not with the Thecus products we have looked at. The N7700 is the same way; nothing could be easier to configure the NAS as long as you have a basic understanding of the way networks work. When I say basic, I really do mean basic. Out of the box the NAS is configured to pull an IP address and the included PC software allows you to instantly set the NAS up for elementary functions.