I recently purchased a Thecus N7700 NAS box with 7 x 2TB drives…. and incase anyone else is doing the same – here are my initial thoughts on the product…
I created one RAID6 volume using XFS, giving me just under 10TB of storage
First up – the interface after upgrading to latest firmware in quite nice…. relatively easy to navigate… a few things that are termed badly – but you can definately find your way around easily enough
Setting up the drives, RAID, notifications, AD integration was all relatively simple (it would be nice if they specified the formats they wanted the AD details in… e.g. the Netbios or the DNS name of your domain)
Drive rebuild times seem relatively slow… about 14 hours to rebuild the set from one failed drive… but theoretically with RAID 6, the chances of 2 more drives dying in a 14 hour timeframe is relatively slim – but still. The estimated time the web interface gives for rebuild is also massively over what it ended up being (initial estimates were 2 days!)
When copying my data onto the NAS, using robocopy (ofcourse!), i noticed that the same data was getting copied again on subsequent copies… even though the file dates were the same. After some investigation i found that using the robocopy switch /FFT (means FAT file times) – will treat the destination file system as FAT and therefore consider a file which has up to a 2 second difference in its timestamp to be considered the “same” (and therefore be skipped).
I’d be interested to see what kind of restrcitions MS put on using NTFS… is it a cash thing, a security thing or a “you only get NTFS with windows” thing… ? as having NTFS as an option for these types of devices would be great.