Review: Thecus N7700: seven bays of NAS goodness?

Performance

In our 64KB sequential read test - using a 1GB file - we see an impressive transfer rate of 94.8MB/s in our RAID-5 array. Pull out one of the seven drives and we see degraded performance drop up to 10 per cent. Plug the aforementioned drive back in, and 64KB sequential read performance drops further to 66.1MB/s during the automatic rebuild process.

As expected, the five-bay QNAP TS-509 Pro - despite its slower 1.6GHz Intel Celeron M processor - is likely to perform marginally quicker in all tests due to a reduction in RAID management overhead.

Our 64KB sequential write test illustrates a seven-disk RAID-5 write speed of 66.1MB/s, and pulling a drive has little-to-no impact on write performance. As always, performance during rebuilding does take a notable hit with write speeds dropping over 20 per cent. Nonetheless, a temporary write speed of 51.2MB/s should be ample and we found the time taken to rebuild to be acceptable at around two-and-a-half hours.

Random read and write performance is, of course, significantly lower. It's worth noting, however, that degraded performance remains solid - the 1.86GHz processor appears to be paying dividends.

Feed the N7700 with 1MB transfers and we see sequential read performance reach a solid 49MB/s. It does take a performance hit of nearly 30 per cent and drop to 34.4MB/s when degraded, though.