NAS vs DAS

lumencreative · 3 Jul 2014 at 11:44

I am building a solution for my small company that is going to be based around a Mac Mini running OSX Server. This will hold all of our company files so needs to be backed up and backed up again.

The hard drive in the Mac Mini is a 500GB basic drive but there's not really much point changing it because even a 1TB drive isn't going to be big enough so I'm going down the route of external storage and using the Mac Mini to do the hard work, so the way I see it working is:

The Mac Mini will back up the Macs in the office and will be a central file store, containing company and customer files. There will then be something like Acronis True Image for Mac running to backup the server daily and this will then *hopefully* be backed up to the cloud.

However, I'm torn between whether to go for Direct Attached Storage (something like the IcyBox IB-RD3640SU3 4 Bay RAID box) or a NAS (something like the Qnap TS-420 4 Bay box).

Any thoughts would be highly appreciated.

Deceptor · 3 Jul 2014 at 11:59

A NAS will prove more flexible and could provide further utilities down the line where as a DAS will just suit one job. Personally I'd vote for the NAS, things like Synology can quickly get you syncing backups to the cloud (like Amazon) without much fuss (no idea about Qnap, never used one of those nas solutions but it likely has similar functionality) and data over the network will no doubt be a benefit if you have multiple machines that need to access common files/documents.

Here's a demo of the Synology system: http://demo.synology.com:5000/ (username: admin, password: synology). Gives you an idea of what it can do (and much more if you tinker around)

lumencreative · 3 Jul 2014 at 12:32

Deceptor said:
A NAS will prove more flexible and could provide further utilities down the line where as a DAS will just suit one job. Personally I'd vote for the NAS, things like Synology can quickly get you syncing backups to the cloud (like Amazon) without much fuss (no idea about Qnap, never used one of those nas solutions but it likely has similar functionality) and data over the network will no doubt be a benefit if you have multiple machines that need to access common files/documents.

Here's a demo of the Synology system: http://demo.synology.com:5000/ (username: admin, password: synology). Gives you an idea of what it can do (and much more if you tinker around)

Thanks for your post. I was initially thinking of going with a NAS but thought the DAS solution would be better seeing as the Mac Mini will be doing many of the functions that a NAS would do.

Thanks for the demo details for the Synology systems. I've had a look and it looks very good. It's a much nicer OS than the Qnap version but the thing I liked about the Qnap one is that it has the ability to sync direct to another Qnap NAS located elsewhere.

Deceptor · 3 Jul 2014 at 13:25

Synology can replicate itself too, I think features between them are fairly similar. If you're dead set on having a server then a DAS may be more appropriate, technically speaking modern NAS's are servers themselves

Ploppy2k3 · 3 Jul 2014 at 16:18

we run 12 QNAP 8 bay devices here and love em.

The iSCSI is great and although the interface is a bit, well. erm, gash the stability is good and all of the bells and whistles in there are good.

what I will say though is QNAP's support it not brilliant which is a shame.

some of our boxes run lots of Hyper-V VHDX's without issue and the newer stuff can be upgraded to 10GB ethernet

lumencreative · 4 Jul 2014 at 02:32

Ok, I've decided to stick with the Mac Mini Server option for now as the NAS enclosure that I like (The Synology DS414) is going to cost almost as much as the Mac Mini would sell for anyway but the Mac Mini would give the added bonus of being another computer if ever needed.

I have narrowed the DAS options down to 2 IcyBox enclosures - the IcyBox IB-3640SU3 and the IcyBox IB-RD3640SU3 (Raid Version).

Both enclosures are identical but one has hardware RAID and one is just JBOD. The JBOD only option is about £30 cheaper than the RAID version.

There's also a 2 Bay version of the RAID model available for another £30 saving over the 4 Bay JBOD model.

What I'd like to know is which of the following makes more sense:

1. RAID Enclosure for data store with 2 x 2TB Drives (with 2TB available) plus another 2TB USB Drive to backup the contents of the RAID Enclosure.

2. Non-RAID Enclosure for data store with 1 x 2TB Drive (with 2TB available) plus another 2 x 2TB USB Drives to backup the contents of the main data store.

If I got a 4 bay Enclosure and just put one drive in for now, am I right in assuming that the JBOD system will be easier to 'upgrade' than a RAID system?