Introduction

Thecus has their own history of Tick Tock behavior with their NAS servers. In April 2009 we reviewed the Thecus N7700 and found it to be an exciting product that was a step above the more consumer focused N5200 Pro while also being worthy of our highest award, the TweakTown Editors Choice. Since that time we reviewed the QNAP TS-809 Pro TurboNAS and found it to be able to transfer data faster with its faster processor (Core 2 Duo compared to the N7700's Celeron M) and more memory.

Thecus' answer to the flagship QNAP unit is now here, the N8800 Pro and N7700 Pro. The new Pro model of the 7700 features a Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of memory. All of that pales in comparison to what came next. For the first time ever a product in this price category has an option to use a 10GbE data connection.

Most home and small office users have already updated their network to gigabit Ethernet, but the next technology leap on the roadmap is 10GbE. As the name implies, the 10GbE standard is around 10 times faster than the current gigabit standard and as you can imagine, this kind of bandwidth comes with a high cost. We will cover the cost and availability on the next page.

Recently we found some really interesting information about the performance of different file systems and how they relate to Thecus hardware. Today we are going to look at the N7700 Pro in the default configuration and compare it to a couple of other NAS servers in the same price class.