Thecus' N7700 NAS, launched back in October 2008 and reviewed by HEXUS shortly after, was found to be a stellar performer - but the Taiwanese manufacturer seems hell-bent on making it quicker.
Back in June, it followed up with an upgraded version dubbed the N7700SAS, and today, it's at it again with an even beefier derivative, the N7700PRO.
The latest version, identifiable by the PRO badge, features the same seven bays of hot-swappable NAS goodness, but there's a number of hardware upgrades designed to deliver "breathtaking performance".
Inside the seven-bay tower resides an Intel Core 2 Duo and 4GB of DDR2 800 memory. That combo should leave most other NAS solutions in the N7700PRO's dust, but there's more - namely a PCIe slot that, when equipped with an optional 10Gb Ethernet adapter, raises the unit's data transfer speeds to over 300MB/s.
In addition to raw speed, the N7700PRO packs many of Thecus' usual goodies. The unit supports a number of RAID modes - including RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and JBOD - and there's support for online RAID expansion and migration. As with the original N7700, the PRO version supports multiple file systems, and it's also equipped with the Dual DOM design previously found in the N7700SAS.
There's no mention of availability or pricing yet, but the N7700SAS is currently going for £951 from SCAN.co.uk. The N7700PRO, then, could tip past the £1,000 mark. If you're feeling really crazy, you could stack five of them together - allowing for up to 70TB of storage managed via a single master unit.
