Thecus N7770-10G Elite-Class Business 7-Bay NAS Review

Seagate Enterprise NAS 6TB Drives

When I received this NAS, Thecus had included five great NAS drives from Seagate’s Enterprise series for me to test this unit with. A great NAS also deserves some great drives and while my usual NAS drives aren’t bad, they’re designed more for the consumer segment.

The 6TB Seagate Enterprise NAS drives are built for reliable performance storage for cloud-based systems and NAS applications from 1 to 16 bay enclosures. They are available up to 8TB capacity, but these five I’m having in the Thecus N7770-10G today are 6TB drives with 128MB cache, a 7200 RPM spindle speed, operating temperatures up to 70 degrees Celcius, and able to withstand shocks of up to 70Gs.

The drives have a long endurance and great workload ratings. The endurance is rated for 300TB a year and they have a 1.2 million hour meantime before failure rating. Seagate is also backing these drives with a 5-Year warranty and also offers 5-Year Rescue Data Recovery options.

The drives are built on customer proven technologies coupled with the newest density platters that allow for lower power consumptions, smaller overall footprint, and lower total cost of ownership over previous drive generations. The RV sensors provide string reliable performance and the controller is flashed with NAS-optimized firmware for balanced reads and writes.

The available Rescue Data Recovery Service options can save the day when the worst case scenario happens. It is an extra feature that you might want to consider when dealing with your important data. Any company is more or less lost when they lose their digital data. Seagate Recovery Services (SRS) can save the day in the following situations: RAID controller failure, Lost RAID configuration, accidental reconfiguration, accidental re-initialization of the RAID array, power surges that cause multiple drive failures simultaneously, missing RAID partitions, reformatted RAID partitions, virus damage, natural disaster, human error and drive failures. Most data can be recovered in-lab with a nearly 90% success rate.

The PCB of the Seagate Enterprise NAS 6TB HDDs is well protected and the HDD controller and motor controller both feature heat transfer pads to help them stay cool in hot environments. The 128MB cache on the HDD is provided by an SK Hynix chip.

The specification sheet below reveals the rest and we see that most of the drives in this series come with equal specifications aside from the capacity with only the 8TB flagship model being a little faster and having a double the cache.

The 6TB model that I’m having five of in this NAS today are rated for an impressive sustained sequential operation of up to 216MB/s and an average access latency of 4.16ms.