Thecus N7700 and TrueNas

[adamdbuk]

Hi all,
first post. Considering re-purposing a dusty old Thecus N7700 Unit with TrueNas. Ideally I'd like to install on the DOM card inside for neatness rather than run from USB. What I could really do with is a tear down guide for the Thecus. I can't work out how to separate the disk drive chassis from the motherboard as there seems to be no room to pull it away from the board. If anyone has a teardown guide for the N7700 that would be great. I'm aware people have simply booted via the BIOS and then installed the NEW OS (TrueNas) onto the DOM card wiping out the old Thecus code. Before I take that route I just want to confirm it won't brick my device and also that the DOM card has enough capacity to install TrueNas.

Hopefully someone out there has already done it.

any advice or links appreciated.. seen quite a few more other models but not the 7700.

thanks
Adam

 

[adamdbuk]

So a little progress. I found a tear down guide here

https://thecus.kayako.com/Knowledgebase/Article/GetAttachment/557/191

So I've been able to dismantle my thecus.
A few things will need sorting i think
RAM. only has a single 1GB module. Will need at least 8gb ( DDR2-667, CL5 unbuffered)
Onboard OS card is only 128mb. Believe these DOM cards 44-Pin IDE Flash Memory cards so hopefully i can source something a little bigger.
There is another USB port on the motherboard (well pins anyhow) so that could be another option.
My last issue is there is no VGA port on this this model!
Luckily there is the pinout on the edge of the board so the capability is there. I've found people have hacked a vga cable to get a direction connection but I think I'll just try and order a right angle vga connector and solder it into place.

Hopefully once I can connect a monitor I'll be able to progress..

I'll post my progress with these adaptions as and when I get the parts through.

If anyone has any suggestions (size of IDE DOM card for example or amount of RAM) please share.

It would be nice to get this thing up and running again. Who knows maybe there's even a BIOS update out there somewhere for the Award BIOS I believe runs on these devices.

Any feedback welcome.

thanks.

 

[ChrisRJ]

What CPU does it have? Quite a few lower end NAS devices have ARM-based ones, which would not work at all.

 

[adamdbuk]

I believe it's a Intel Celeron M 1.86GHz out of the box but apparently i've read people upgrade this to core 2 duos.

Hopefully enough grunt for the job.

 

[HoneyBadger]

From some quick searches, it appears that you can upgrade this unit only to a maximum of 4GB of RAM (still DDR2) - in addition to that it uses the Marvell 88SE63xx for its storage controller.

I'd recommend against Free/TrueNAS on this specific device. A roll-your-own NAS using Linux perhaps, possibly even ZFS, but not the TrueNAS "appliance-style" approach.

 

[adamdbuk]

Oh right. That's a shame. Sounds as though it might not be worth the effort involved then (seeing as I need to source a larger ide dom unit more ram and hardware mods to add a vga port. None of which are going to be cheap. Might cut my losses then as sell on as is. Thanks for the advice.