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

Local Display and Mobile Impressions

The Thecus N7770-10G has plenty of horsepower under the hood to do so much more than just being a NAS. You can install the LocalDisplay module and use it as HTPC replacement. Connect a mouse, keyboard, and monitor to the NAS and you don’t need any extra hardware to browse the web or local files. You can install quite a few addons too, where one of them is VLC.

FireFox is still one of the preferred browsers and it is the one that is pre-installed with the LocalDisplay module. You can use it to connect to the Thecus OS admin interface or visit eTeknix.com as shown here. We of course prefer the last one.

Thecus Dashboard for Android

The Thecus Dashboard for Android is a simple yet powerful little companion that it is worth loading onto your phone or tablet. It doesn’t provide access to all the features you just can access via the browser anyway as other apps, it instead focuses on the key functions that you’ll actually need on your mobile device.

The discovery function didn’t work on my Samsung Galaxy Tab2, but it’s also an older device. However, adding a server manually worked like a charm.

Clicking on the added server from the list and you’re brought to a login page. Enter your normal admin password and select whether the device should save the password or not. With the limited security that we have on mobile devices, I would recommend not to remember it.

Once logged in, we see the three features that the Thecus Dashboard has: Service Status monitoring, the ability to change user passwords, and to bind this Android unit to the NAS.

The service status page provides all information you need at a glance, from CPU load to fan status and uptime.

You can also view, enable, and disable running services quickly.

You got access to all the users that you have created with the ability to quickly change their passwords.

And finally, a simple binding function between the Android unit and the Thecus NAS.