Thecus N8800PRO Diskless System 10GbE Ready, 2U Power Storage Server

Pros: 10 Gb Networking, great capacity, great price. I/O scheduling crushes default linux server scheduling under load.

Cons: Internal build quality could be better -- some loose cabling, which makes hot-swaps of internal components (e.g. system fans) more delicate than it needs to be.

Other Thoughts: These things replaced dedicated linux servers (also with 10Gb networking). Solved our data throughput issues immediately. We have 3x (w/ 8x2TB seagate constellations) installed in our small biz cluser with a 10Gb backbone, works great.

Pros: For starters, do your research. One of the best low end/smb caliber devices on the market, yes there are limitations but go buy EMC or NetApp if you need enterprise features like volume expansion (it does have RAID migration so you can create a new RAID and migrate your data to the new one).

Cons: Not an "enterprise" product, but great for the costs.

Other Thoughts: N/A - really one of your cons is "RAID10 requires four disks" do you even know what RAID10 is? Let me tell you its RAID0, which requires at least 2 disks to do the stripe, plus RAID1 which is a mirror of your RAID0 set, so at a bare minimum you need 4 disks to do RAID10. Oh and by the way, multiple computers can use the same iSCSI target address, you don't need one per computer. Learn something about SANs before posting negative comments.

Pros: Liked the locking hard drive trays.

Cons: In addition, this thing has some really weird setups for the disks that it uses for a RAID array. You have three choices, ZFS, EXT3 or some other I cannot remember, and you can only pick one for each volume. If you use ZFS, the volume "cannot be expanded", meaning they have a subpar implementation of ZFS. And there's no way I'm going to make a 14TB RAID5 EXT3 volume in a virtualized environment.

Pros: Dual power supplies and NICs, comes with mounting rails. UI written in flash, it's relatively painless.

Cons: I was overwhelmingly disappointed in this product for server room use. Particularly fatal is the fact that it can only create five iSCSI targets for each RAID volume. RAID10 requires four disks, and if you add a disk to a RAID volume, it adds the entire disk.

Well, there are only eight disk slots, which means that you can only have two RAID10 arrays, for a total of 10 iSCSI targets. It's useless to have 10Gb ethernet if you can only serve ten iSCSI clients (usually one per machine) max.

For a server that calls itself a "Power Storage Server", that's pretty lame. This thing should be able to serve 10-30x the clients based on capacity.

What was worse was trying to get through to their tech support. Their phone system cuts off the line after ten minutes in the queue and the techs refuse to call back except for what seemed like way too much work. It's like they are hiding or overwhelmed or something.

Other Thoughts: Newegg, as usual, was the star player here and accepted the return. I lost $100 on overnight shipping, but I guess ya gotta pay to play. The thing got great reviews in a Tom's Hardware Guide NAS storage shootout. Those guys are usually pretty good, but I'd be careful about this unit.