Thecus launches world's first 10GbE NAS

The demand for storage is ever increasing, and that's more than just a marketing term. Regardless are we talking about pictures, video, web - content is ever increasing. For instance, BSN's video arm uses RED One and capturing footage is not as easy as one might think. The rates measured in hundreds of megabytes per second of uncompressed stream. For instance, an uncompressed RED One [2560p] stream requires your hardware to capture 1.03GB/s [8.27 Gbps] - thus you have to use compression and still end up with hundreds of megabytes per second [if you want to sustain quality and not have compression noise in darker areas].

While local multi-drive RAID solution is the way to go, the space will run out sooner or later... and current generation of NAS products just isn't capable enough. Even 1Gbps Ethernet is too slow to do any good. Now, Thecus thinks they just might be the ticket to ride with their N7700Pro. As the name implies, the device comes with seven SATA bays, meaning you could plug in seven 2TB hard drives for 14 TeraBytes of storage space.

In order to provide enough throughput for seven hard drives, time was up for Atom, Celeron and similar low-cost low-performance parts. N7700Pro uses fully-fledged 45nm Core 2 Duo processor as a network controller, featuring 4GB of DDR2-800 memory. Integrated PCIe slot can support 10Gb Ethernet adapter at full speed [1.25 GB/s], but if you install hard drives at 7200 rpm, Thecus claims you can easily get 300MB/s. The show doesn't stop there - you can stack up to five N7700Pro devices and managed them all as a single unit for a combined storage space of 196TB. However, N7700Pro doesn't come with rackmount-compatible design [such as eight drive N8800].

As far as data safety go, with terabytes of data on the line, it is very important to have as redundant setup as possible. With seven drives, we would not advise anything else but RAID6 [two spare drives], with N7700Pro supporting RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and JBOD mode. But features are just one part of the whole deal. Unlike the competing products, N7700Pro comes with Dual DOM [Disk-on-Module], one flash drive with operating system and the like would fail, the second DOM will pick it up. All in all, N7700Pro looks promising, but we have to check the device to see if those promises falter or not.