[Gllug] Cheapish NAS.

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

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.

I can think of 3 options / strategies so far...

Option 1 - Little NAS boxen like the 2nd gen Drobo+Droboshare and the
Qnap TS-419P Turbo NAS. My first concerns with those are the throughput
though. Does anyone own/use one of these things (over Gigabit LAN), if
so what kind of performance are you seeing? I've head tale of 4 drive
Drobos only kicking out 12MB/s (bleugh!? Can that be true?).

My other concern is the difficulty of data recovery should they fail.
I'm guessing it's the same situ as a hardware raid controller popping:
only the exact same model is going to get you your data back (so unless
you keep a spare handy a failure could mean serious downtime). Are there
any NAS boxen who's contents you can recover by directly attaching them
to a PC or do they all work like this? If that's the case then I suppose
(though I'd REALLY love to avoid the hassle of it) I could build them...

Option 2. A small PC based server with a 3 disk software RAID 5,
possibly running FreeNAS or OpenFiler. Given that I don't really want
the hassle I'd want to charge at least £100 for my time building &
testing the thing. That would leave ~£350 for all the bits. Does that
seem realistic for a box with reasonable performance (say avg 40MB/s
throughput)? I've never built a raid based system before, how much more
to recovering is there than just slinging all the drives in a fresh box
and hitting the power switch if, say, the mobo suddenly died? Pls bear
in mind I'm no linux ninja, almost all my work is supporting Windows &
Mac at the domestic level and I just switched my workshop machine to
Ubuntu a mere 18 months ago!

The third option I can see is to go for a cheap 2 * 1 Tb NAS enclosure
(~£250), set it to RAID 0 (for high performance) and use the balance of
the money to make sure it gets very well backed up every day*. I was
thinking a salvaged p4 box (they have a couple spare) w/ a 2Tb disk &
open solaris so I could use ZFS and do an rsync + snapshots every few
hours? Of course I've never setup a business grade backup system either,
does the above sound like a even half sane plan?

I'm eager to know what you would do. All advice warmly welcomed, even if
it's "your budget isn't big enough!". I have to say I'm very tempted by
Option 1: almost zero maintenance and virtually no time to setup is a
big win IMHO but I'd rather recommend the right thing than satiate my
laziness! ;)

Cheers,

Roger.


* i.e. Better than their current backup regime. I know the other options
ought to be "very well backed up" too but I haven't got round to talking
backup with him yet, he currently just plugs in one of two USB HD's in
every other day and seems fairly happy doing that. I think using RAID 0
for the main server would mandate a more serious, regular, automated
backup system!
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