Understanding the capabilities of a NAS

Soldato
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Hi guys, hopefully this is the right section, it was a coin toss between here and storage!

I work in a school, as a Media teacher to be precise. As we have a couple of dozen students who shoot and upload footage and photos in RAW our storage needs very much outstrip the facilities provided to us by the school. As a solution the school provided us with an ethernet 2tb HDD which provides enough capacity but obviously offers no failure protection, user management or backup system, (every student can access the entire drive, i'm just waiting for one to hit delete!). We also have the issue that when uploading uncompressed 1080i footage it completely brings the drive to a standstill when other students need to access it too.

This has led me to suggest purchasing a NAS for ourselves as my limited knowledge leads me to believe that it will give us better data security and better management of users. A 4-drive NAS would hopefully offer us much better speed to due to being able to use RAID.

In terms of budget, we are relatively limited due to being, well, a school. We figured we could afford up to roughly £600. This led me to the below NAS:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=NW-012-QN&groupid=46&catid=2125&subcat=

This plus 4 1tb drives would bring us roughly in line with the budget we've laid out. Will this offer what we need? Speed is priority, but the ability to protect folders with user accounts, data security and ideally (but as the lowest priority) a means of backing up the data incase of accidental deletions is what we need.

Am i right in thinkin Raid-5 would be the best thing to run it in with 4 drives?

Would this be a step in the right direction from a single ethernet hard drive, or am i barking up the wrong tree? Should i be looking into something else?
 
that would be fine, but what is the school's policy for connecting network devices? You can do many things with that NAS but the hard work is down to you to provide policies for users etc. RAID 5 is *probably* what I'd go for, but I'm sure somebody else will have a different take on this...

Thanks for the reply.

The policy is... well non existant really. We just generally ask and are told yes or no. I am happy to do the leg work to configure the NAS itself, in fact i'd actually regard that as a benefit of using it rather than a drawback. The support guys at the school don't generally have the fastest turnaround for sorting out network issues and they rarely get it right the first time (usually we have to explain how we want things done several times before it actually happens that way), i'm confident i'll be able to maintain it myself.

As far as i can tell (which isn't much, having never used raid before) its between Raid 4 and 5. I'll likely go for 5 as there will be a lot of data being written to it and iirc 4 has bottlenecking issues that would slow it down.
 
Hi guys, sorry ive had a couple of busy days so haven't had a chance to post back. We're still considering our options.

Backup wise, apparently getting our drive backed up isn't an option as we use too much space. This is surprising to me as the school recently forked out a rather sizable chunk of cash for a new storage solution and backup system.

My head of faculty said he would rather spend a little extra and future proof the solution we buy. So whilst 2x3tb in Raid 1 is certainly the most cost effective way of solving our problem, a 4-drive NAS with 4x1tb, thus allowing for future expansion, might be the best option.

I'm certain i will go for a Synology one now though after looking at their community support.
 
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