Cheap low cost bulk storage.

[MasterPlan1]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for big bulk storage, as we have lots of designers which need to keep old projects etc on hand, but don't necessarily need to be on our main expensive SAN, and can be homed off somewhere else...

I was thinking of building a big box of 20 disks using a Norco and putting FreeNAS on there, but my boss didn't like the idea of being unsupported... If storage spaces were a bit more mature, I'd also suggest that. Or maybe even just building a straight up windows box with lots of storage.

Anyone else got any ideas? Ideally a big NAS with iSCSI, or a DIY box with an OS where we can get pay-by-case support.

 

[MasterPlan1]

We currently have HP left-hand stuff, a 12tb node comes in at like 6k, so anything under that which is why I was thinking Norco + disks and a controller... As from rough calcs using WD Reds I could build a box with lots of storage for a couple of k. Especially because its just a dump and store box...

 

[MasterPlan1]

I think we're going to go with a couple of QNap 8 disk Pro jobbies, load them up with 8x2Tb WD Reds - they're only going to be used for DFS Replicas for DR\backup purposes and the previously mentioned dump drives for designers, it seems like a happy median between a home built and a off the shelf solution.