Rackmountable NAS - any recommendations on brand?

steinooo · 11 Jun 2013 at 11:00

Hi all,

I'm in the market for a 4 bay rackmountable NAS to put in 4 x 1TB drives in RAID 5, doesn't need a gigabit port but it would be nice to have a web interface.

Does anyone suggest any particular brand please?

thanks.

jameshurrell · 11 Jun 2013 at 13:30

I would be looking at QNAP or Synology. Both do 4 port rack mountable NASs with a web interface, capable of RAID5.

I have two QNAPs in clients (very small businesses) and both have been in for 2 years now without issue (these are the 2 bay tower versions though). Just make sure you check HDD compatibility if you are running RAID.

steinooo · 11 Jun 2013 at 16:40

thanks for the tip, I did have my eye on a synology but didn't want to influence anyone's opinion before I posted, it looks good gear. Good tip about HDDs

jameshurrell · 11 Jun 2013 at 17:23

Yes, with QNAPs there are some issues using the WD Green series drives - basically they drop out sporadically even in non RAID. There is also a disclaimer about using desktop drives in a RAID config, but I have 2x WD10EALS in RAID1 at home that have been totally stable.

Just check the compatibility list first before you spend cash on drives.

Nikumba · 12 Jun 2013 at 09:17

Also as daft as it sounds, try to source the drives from two supplies, so two drives from one and the other two from another.

Reason behind this, is suppier 1 has gotten a bad batch from the manufacture and you lose a drive they is a high chance you could lose another before the RAID is rebuilt, now the odds of that really happening are very slim, but on a 4 disk RAID5 it is something I would consider doing.

Kimbie

steinooo · 12 Jun 2013 at 12:01

thanks for the tips.

Does anyone have any knowledge on the USB / eSata ports on the front of these things?

Perhaps they could be used to take the backups offsite periodically for greater resilience, but does anyone know how easy this function is to use?

ASE001 · 12 Jun 2013 at 13:00

Which ever you choice you make, ensure it supports SCSI-3 Persistent Reservation of the drives or some of the advanced features of MS server 2012 won't work i.e. Clustering.

See this http://social.technet.microsoft.com...g/thread/da479813-1c6e-4c5f-93dd-78285cd57222

I'm having the problem with iSCSI on a NAS4FREE setup!

jameshurrell · 12 Jun 2013 at 14:06

steinooo said:
thanks for the tips.

Does anyone have any knowledge on the USB / eSata ports on the front of these things?

Perhaps they could be used to take the backups offsite periodically for greater resilience, but does anyone know how easy this function is to use?

On the QNAPs, you can plug in multiple external drives to the rear USB or eSata ports and configure a backup to run to the external drives whenever required. I do mine nightly. You could quite easily rotate the drives if you wanted to. The backup is a simple "mirror" type backup where you can tell it to remove extra files on the target. You can also configure it to backup to third party services - I'm using a bucket on Amazon S3 to store some stuff. It also offers the possibility of setting up rsync to a remote NAS or rsync server.

The front USB port AFAIK acts like a standard USB port in that you can plug in an external drive etc. This port can also be used with the "One touch" feature, where you plug in a memory stick/drive, push a button and it copies across the predefined files in either direction.

Have a look on the QNAP/Synology websites - there are live demos of the web interfaces that give you a much better idea of how things work, plus the documentation of course.

steinooo · 13 Jun 2013 at 09:40

ASE001 said:
Which ever you choice you make, ensure it supports SCSI-3 Persistent Reservation of the drives or some of the advanced features of MS server 2012 won't work i.e. Clustering.

cheers mate but I won't be using this kind of OS. The host machine is a ESX machine with some Windows 2k8R2 VMs for which i'm planning on just creating a robocopy script to back the files off to the NAS.

jameshurrell said:
On the QNAPs, you can plug in multiple external drives to the rear USB or eSata ports and configure a backup to run to the external drives whenever required. I do mine nightly. You could quite easily rotate the drives if you wanted to. The backup is a simple "mirror" type backup where you can tell it to remove extra files on the target.

that sounds great because for the cost of an external eSata drive I can get someone at the site to "take the drive home daily and replace it in the morning" giving the data even more redundancy.