n7700 Pro vs. n8800 Pro

[JimNasium]

I'm considering purchasing a Thecus N7700 Pro (or N8800 Pro) to house my MS Server 2008 R2 (hyper-v) virtual servers. I have 3 virtual servers so far (1 AD/file server; 1 Terminal Server - hosting our company's [mission critical] accounting system!; 1 SQL 2k8 Server). I'm looking for advice, technical and otherwise...with these specific questions in mind:

1. Would you suggest going with a N7700 Pro or N8800 Pro considering reliability, performance, budget, and support/maintenance.
2. Would either device (a N7700 Pro or N8800 Pro) support Server 2k8 R2's Live Migration features (reliably/efficiently)? anyone have experience with this specific setup?
3. If/when we run into issues, is Thecus' technical support reliable?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[el_bouv]

Hi

I would advise you to give Thecus products a wide berth.

I have had a 2 TB drive on a new N7700 drive fail after 39 days.

Thecus is not the technology that you want to trust any persistent data to.

The product, and their technical capability sucks.

Not a happy choice at all.

el_bouv

[el_bouv]

Hi

I would advise you to give Thecus products a wide berth.

I have just had a @TB drive fail after 39 a mere days on a N7700.

Not the kind of technology you want to trust persistent data to.

The company, products and technical competency all suck.

Not a happy experience.

el_bouv

[JimNasium]

Thanks for the feedback el_bouv. I've already decided it probably wasn't in my company's best interest to go with one of these devices for our mission critical systems since my initial call to tech support went unanswered and straight to voice mail! Not a good first impression Thecus support! We've been advised to use a Netgear ReadyNAS device for our needs instead.

I guess the Thecus devices and their support team are not built or ready for larger, more robust types of environments, and they probably belong in a smaller or less critical role in the network.

I actually already do use a 2Terabyte Thecus N5200 for our long term backup storage, which so far (over the past 10 months) has worked perfectly for this need. I just won't be relying on another one of these as our main (always on) "poor man's SAN".

[spoon_]

Matey, noone can really treat all these home NAS boxes seriously when it comes to critical business data. Performance and reliability is appalling. Everything "might" be running fine for months but when actually something goes i.e. dead HDDs that's where you'd see the difference between "proper solution" and Thecus/QNAP/Synology/NetGear.

NetApp is a good starting point, shame that S500's aren't manufactured anymore are they'd probably do the trick (if not it's probably cuz they're expensive and you'd not be willing to splash that much)

Think about for a while before making a decision.