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.

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

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?

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.