[Gllug] Cheapish NAS.

[James Courtier-Dutton]

On 16 February 2010 04:01, general_email at technicalbloke.com
<general_email at technicalbloke.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I could do with a bit of advice, it seems I have an embarrassment of
> options to choose from! The question is what would be the best
> replacement for my client's ancient win2K file server. They are an
> architects office with ~6 PCs on Gb Ethernet. Many files are quite large
> so throughput fairly important. Budget is ~£450 (pre VAT) for hardware
> and they want at least 1.5Tb of usable space in it. Expandability is
> desirable (naturally) but not pivotal.
>
Budget is too low.
What is the spec of the current win2K file server?
What do you need regarding backups? One cannot really decide on a
server without having to also think about the backup solution and the
security (not loosing it) of the data. 1.5Tb is getting a bit much for
a USB HD.
I guess that your architects have been very lucky up till now that a
hard disk has not failed on them.

Performance should not be too much of a problem as RAID is OK when one
is using large files.
Increasing the amount of RAM on the server will greatly improve the
access speeds as far more data will be cached in RAM.

If you want to make life easy when a failure happens would be to have
two machines, and synchronise between them. Then if one server fails,
the standby one is sitting there waiting. I normally do this, with the
standby server not necessarily as fast as the main one, but good
enough until you get to site to fix the main one.

Then you just need to worry about the "protection from a disaster.
I.e. fire or flood" where off site backup is needed.

The various cheap NAS boxes are not very reliable. They tend to
overhead due to lack of adequate fan cooling.

Kind Regards

James
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