Spec me a NAS

Banzai_Joe

Banzai_Joe

Banzai_Joe

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Hi all,

i've got to provide options for one of our subsidiary companies who are running a terribly setup adhoc network (workgroup styley), with a mix of pc's running win 7, vista, xp and macosx. All connect to a filserver running xp which is on its last legs. The switch is a crappy 10/100 and they wonder why they have bottlenecks and sage freezes on client pc's when trying to access the database on the xp fileserver.

So....armed with next to no budget, hence they already kicked into touch the idea of a client-server install (as it could be a sub-domain of our main office), i'm thinking of replacing the xp fileserver with a nas box.
They only have less than 20gb of data across the company.

So was thinking, single bay nas box or multiple for raid?
There seem to be quite a lot of NAS boxes where the single drive setup is faster than raided setups (not as resilient, but faster).

If i went for single disk, then 500gb (purely cos they're faster than 250gb drives) would be more than enough. If i went for raid then i'd stick 3 x 250gb drives in for raid 5.
But with all other things being equal, which setup would be faster?

It needs a usb port so backups to external usb drive can be done daily. Print server features would be nice, but it MUST have GIGABIT connection (i'll replace the existing switch with a gigabit one).

Looking to spend £400 max on NAS and drives.

Thanks for any help offered.
 
Thanks guys,

the Synology DiskStation DS710+ is more like what i'm after as it's write speed is around double what the DS410 and DS211 are.
They move a lot of large cad files around and i want them to be able to work with files directly on the nas rather than keep copying them onto their local pc to work on then copying them back.

Do you think my logic is sound? The DS711+ is the same price as the DS410. Still open to any other suggestions. I have some hdd's that can be used in raid so i won't be breaking the £400 budget.

edit: Sorry, i forgot to mention the £400 was exc. vat, not inc. so it makes it more attractive. :)
 
you dont want to be hosting there files on a single drive inside a nas box thats just asking for trouble. probably cheaper/better to pick up a cheapish server with rundandant storage and install redhat or similar on to host there files. also you want to make sure this is backed up/replicated to another site!

regarding the slow access to sage, whats the setup of windows xp server at the moment? 100Mb should be more than enough for database access, are you sure its a switch they have and not a hub?
 
Banzai_Joe said:
Thanks guys,

the Synology DiskStation DS710+ is more like what i'm after as it's write speed is around double what the DS410 and DS211 are.
They move a lot of large cad files around and i want them to be able to work with files directly on the nas rather than keep copying them onto their local pc to work on then copying them back.

Do you think my logic is sound? The DS711+ is the same price as the DS410. Still open to any other suggestions. I have some hdd's that can be used in raid so i won't be breaking the £400 budget.

edit: Sorry, i forgot to mention the £400 was exc. vat, not inc. so it makes it more attractive. :)
Click to expand...
Provided I'm not missing something, this seems like an obvious case for the HP ProLiant MicroServer.

£150 after £100 cashback from HP. Comes with 1GB RAM and a 250GB 7200rpm SATA drive. Built in gigabit NIC with a low-profile PCI-e slot for expandability.

Drop £100 on a couple of decent 500GB drives, shove them in a RAID 1 array, maybe throw a little more RAM in and you're done? :)
 
Ahaa...good call Al, thanks.

It would probably benefit from an add-in pcie hardware raid card over the built-in software raid, but its certainly worth looking into.
I wonder how the data throughput speeds measure against one of the dedicated NAS solutions above?
Any ideas?
 
Hi jim, yeah looked at the qnap range but they seem to be slower in bechmarks for data throughput speeds than the others i'd been looking at.
 
The HP Microserver looks fairly promising for its price.
I was thinking of putting WHS 1 on it to serve 8 clients.
I'd choose this for its backup and easy sharing features. (i used WHS 1 on my home network for 18 months, really liked it)
Obviously it won't do raid, but as long as the data speeds are decent it should be ok.
Any opinions on this?
 
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