Specifications, Availability and Pricing

When it comes to the hardware specs there aren't too many products on that market that are even in the same class as the Thecus N7700 Pro. The standouts are easy to see; Intel Core2 Duo processor, 4GB DDR2, seven drives that can run in 14GB arrays and the feature that is totally unique at this price point, 10GbE with the addition of an Intel 10GbE PCIe 8x card.

All this power does have a cost, but it isn't as bad as you would expect. Newegg has the N7700 Pro on their website but does not show a price at this time as they are waiting to replenish stock. They do list the N7700 model as being in stock and they show a price of 949.99 USD at this time. After looking around the web we were able to find the N7700 Pro for 1,055.00 USD at eAegis. This price does not include the newly introduced Intel 10GbE Ethernet card and at this time they are very difficult to find. I was told by a Thecus rep that these cards will start to hit the market in mass in a couple of weeks.

When it comes to 10GbE home and small office users should not even start to consider this type of upgrade. After looking around for surplus parts the lowest cost PCI X card I was able to find was 199, PCIe 250 and 10GbE switch 2995 USD. The best usage for this kind of connectivity would come from environments of 30 or more users that are connected to a gigabit switch that has an additional 10GbE gbic connected to the N7700 Pro. Of course, over time we will start to see enterprise hardware being replaced and more surplus 10GbE parts will hit the used market. NAS purchases are really a long term deal; you don't change them every other year like some components like a processor or full machine. Having the ability to enable 10GbE in a couple of years is a really nice option.