[Gllug] Cheapish NAS.

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 04:01:57AM +0000, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
> 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.

This budget is very limited for the number of clients.  For this price
and to achieve acceptable performance, I would be looking for a second
hand server or second hand large desktop machine that you can fill
with as many 0.5 or 1 Tb SATA hard drives as budget and space will
allow.

Hopefully if you go second hand you won't be limited by processor
power, and you should be able to get 1 or 2 gigE ethernet ports.  SATA
ensures that you'll have enough bandwidth internally.  And 0.5 or 1 Tb
drives are cheap enough that you should be able to buy enough of them
new with whatever remains of your budget to reach the desired capacity
and reliability level.

Slap CentOS 5 on it, RAID the drives together, and off you go.  I
would use one or two external USB drives as a simple back-up.  Get one
of the staff to take it home on rotation so they're backed up
off-site.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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