Spec me a NAS

[swain90]

Hi All,

I'm looking at getting a NAS for a production environment.

I've had a play with the xpenology operating system (web interface) and everything seems quite straight forward. (Apart from my weird Hyper V disk issue)

The two systems I've pulled out as possabilities are;

Synology RS816 4x2TB (8TB)
NETGEAR ReadyNAS 3138 RN31843E 4x3TB (12TB)


The servers attaching to this will be Windows Server 2003, I've had a look at the specs for both and they both require a minimum os required as Windows 7.

In my test environment I've used Server 2003 and Firefox Portable ESR to connect to the xpenology and can create shares fine, so I was wondering what the requirement for Windows 7 and above is for?

I'd prefer to go with the Synology as the retailer specifically states it comes with WD drives which I would prefer, the netgear just states they use enterprise disks.

My experiences with NAS' are pretty limited as we tend to just bung a large disk in a server for our dev environment.

Have I missed something, or are they all very similar?

The disks will be setup as 2x RAID1 arrays. Even the 8TB will probably be overkill so I doubt i'd ever have to expand the storage.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

Swain90

 

[pcfarrar]

The Synology should work fine with server 2003. You will just need to set the minimum SMB protocol to SMB1.

 

[Avalon]

What's the IO load from multiple users going to look like? Gigabit theoretical limit is 125MB/s, realistically you'll not see that, multiple users reading/writing at once and you'll see nothing like that, if that's not a consideration, or the files are small, then no problem, if we're talking lots of reads and writes at the same time and with large files, then the LAN side may need some consideration.

 

[swain90]

There will be very little user input.

We are looking to use robocopy to update files on the nas so we can manage the bandwith.

 

[Conanius]

Personally I'd use a vanilla 1/2U server with cheap big discs and some sort of freenas type product.

I don't rate the entry level enterprise gear from Netgear or Synology.

We recently repurposed a HP G7 DL380 and put some seagate barracuda 3TB 2.5 drives in and run freenas on it.

Absolutely brilliant setup - granted this example was made cheap by having the old hardware, but 90 day warranty repurposed G7's are incredibly cheap - read under £200 with rack rails, RAM and dual cpus - And you can get them covered with a supplier like Phoenix or whomever else very cheaply if you do want some formal support