san/nas for home lab

W

WoodiE

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 28, 2003
Messages
231
I'm looking for a low cost but useable san/nas that I can use on my home lab. Will be used to practice on and study for my VCP exam.

Would like to run 3-4 Windows 7 machines, and maybe a 2008 server or two as well for AD, DHCP.

I thought about going with two HDD's in raid 0 for speed but now I'm thinking about using a SAN/NAS so I can easily add another host to further practice on.

Any suggestions on a setup that would hold a total of 6-7 VM's that's only going to be used by me at home?
 
Synology DS1511+ is spoken highly of but you'll end up dropping about $1,000 for one.

If you want to build something yourself, build a decent little box (dual core, 2GB of RAM, 2+ Gb PCI-E network cards, and several SATA drives) and load it up with FreeNAS 8.0 or any other Linux distro of your choice. This can be done for ~$400 depending on how many disks you buy.
 
If you're trying to keep costs down, just do as Child of Wonder suggested. This would be the cheapest/easiest solution.
 
For about $600 you can get a TS-239 Pro II+ loaded with drives That will also work.
 
I'll 2nd FreeNAS. Been using it for a while for a Lab NAS. Works Great.
 
I would build my own but if you don't want to go down that route then look no further than the Synology DS1511+. Blazing FAST! and packed with features!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top