Which NAS for small business?

[sasquatch182]

I typically build all my PCs but need a NAS for my office. We will have 2 to 5 pcs connected. The connection is 1GB Lan but some are wireless notebooks. Should not be more that 7 units connected to this box.

What should I be looking for and what kind of price?
I would love to have something RAID 5 for redundant backups. But I'm not sure I can afford it.

If you have any ideas, let me know. Storage requirements would be about 500MB-1TB max.

Almost forgot to mention. It will be for quickbooks access my mulitple users and a bit of database access as well. Of course backups too.

Thanks for any advice

 

[s0rce]

What sort of speed do you want? 1TB is very little storage, you could grab a cheap little 2 bay NAS and run a mirrored 2x 2TB setup easily. a ReadyNAS, Qnap or Synology unit would probably be fine.

If you want to build it yourself you could get a Intel atom or AMD fusion system with a few disks and run windows/bsd/solaris...

 

[Chrisroman]

Could always put a couple 2TB drives in one of the existing workstations using onboard RAID 1 and then create mapped shares. I prefer not to add new things that can break and need maintainence unless I absolutely have to. $170 for a couple drives and your good to go.

 

[sasquatch182]

What sort of speed do you want? 1TB is very little storage, you could grab a cheap little 2 bay NAS and run a mirrored 2x 2TB setup easily. a ReadyNAS, Qnap or Synology unit would probably be fine.

If you want to build it yourself you could get a Intel atom or AMD fusion system with a few disks and run windows/bsd/solaris...

Yep, I thought about this but reading some of the review say these are slow. Considering the database access and the quickbooks stuff, I'm worried it will be slow and everyone will complain.

 

[GeorgeHR]

Could always put a couple 2TB drives in one of the existing workstations using onboard RAID 1 and then create mapped shares. I prefer not to add new things that can break and need maintainence unless I absolutely have to. $170 for a couple drives and your good to go.

I like that solution.

sasquatch182 needs to be reminded that RAID is not a backup plan. Add an external drive, USB connection is probably fast enough. Then use any backup software to do incremental backups to it.

 

[Blue Fox]

If you want something small/inexpensive, yet fairly quick, this might fit your needs after you add a couple drives: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822122080

 

[hyuwa]

get one of those 2 bay nas or 4 bay nas from synology or qnap and u should be fine

 

[_Gea]

I typically build all my PCs but need a NAS for my office. We will have 2 to 5 pcs connected. The connection is 1GB Lan but some are wireless notebooks. Should not be more that 7 units connected to this box.

What should I be looking for and what kind of price?
I would love to have something RAID 5 for redundant backups. But I'm not sure I can afford it.

If you have any ideas, let me know. Storage requirements would be about 500MB-1TB max.

Almost forgot to mention. It will be for quickbooks access my mulitple users and a bit of database access as well. Of course backups too.

Thanks for any advice

buy a 4bay hp microserver with 4 or 8 gb ram (200-300 Euro without disks) and download a zfs appliance software
like NexentaStor CE or NexentaCore/OpenIndiana/Solaris Express + napp-it with a WEB-UI to manage the box
(all beside Solaris Express are free for comercial use)

After 30min and a very easy install you have a storage appliance with superior performance and features
like nearly unlimited snapshots without initial space consumption to restore deleted or changed files,
end to end checksums for data security and online datascrubbing against silent data failures.

use a mirror of 2 x 2 TB disks to have space for snapshots and the other two slots for backup or hotspare.
remove/ change the backup drive(s) regularly to protect data against fire or overvoltage

much more performance, data security and features like any NAS you can buy from store

 

[bleomycin]

I'm going to agree with everyone recommending synology, they make a quality product. Without knowing the actual budget it's difficult to make any specific recommendations. It does sound like you'll be fine with raid1 assuming you get a fairly quick unit. I have an old 500gb buffalo linkstation pro duo i rooted and run rsnapshot on to backup a bunch of remote servers and it's been online without a reboot or single issue for 848 days now, it is however extremely slow (samba taps out at ~15MB/s read speed from it)

Considering price is a major concern, once you settle on the NAS you could also have off site backup of the NAS utilizing backblaze ($50/year unlimited storage) by running their client on one of the pc's in the office with full access to the NAS. I haven't personally done this with backblaze, if for some reason it restricts backing up mapped drives in windows this workaround will *probably* get around it http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/recipe/back_up_windows_mapped_drives

 

[Ronco]

You build all your business PC's? Good luck with that
(although I don't know what you do, and how good you are at building. It's just something I'd never contemplate).

Something that's worked really well for me in the satellite offices has been Windows Home Server. The loss of Drive Extender was a bit of a crock in the current version, but the present iteration still has plenty of reasons to choose it, including workstation backups that are actually useful.

We're still running the older versions of WHS and I have no plans to upgrade them for a while, but they've served me well. If you're building, you can build a machine tailored for WHS I guess.