NAS Boxes

[John-Paul Damico]

Certain clients need more storage than others.  With TB storage options getting cheaper and much more prevalent I wanted to to pose a question.  Do small and medium sized businesses still need to purchase the 1u, 2u, or even 4u units to get decent storage performance when looking at NAS boxes?  There are some prosumer non rack-mountable options that give the same features as well as the same amount of storage.  With SAN capabilities, you could have many of these units and surpass even the 4u NAS units quite easily.  

I had a client that needed about 16TB worth of storage.  After doing the research, I had a hard time coming up with a reason not to push them towards the LaCie 5big NAS Pro 20TB (Raid 5 gives the client 16TB of storage).  At $1800, it is a third of the price to the rack mountable units with higher processor and mem specs.  

Thoughts?

[ply...@afterhourscr.com]

I'm really starting to like the Drobo 5D, 5N. It's $800ish retail but Amazon is now selling for $550 at a recent glance. I didn't know about these until last year. It's basically an everyman's NAS. No NAS knowledge needed really. You can literally put any hard drive brand, size or type in it. You could have two WD 2TB drives, and a 1 TB Seagate. Press a button, and voila. It does all the work for you. 

It's scale is infinite to my knowledge. Spanning 5 drives whatever their sizes. Thunderbolt/USB 3.0 for the 5D, network for the 5N. There are smaller versions too, but the 5D would be best for my video productions needs. 

Uses BeyondRAID, Single or dual redundancy, hot-swappable drives. You could literally be pulling files off, and rip a HDD out with no down time. Add a new HDD for expansion? Slap it in, press a button, BAM done.

It's got a small battery in it incase of power failure, and has an extra spot for an mSATA SSD for crazy fast access to the data in the HDDs. Daisy chaining, open expansion for any type of drive you want, easy GUI.  I'm not sure what else I'd need! For that kind of money you can't go wrong. I can't wait to get my hands on one and I tell everyone I know about them if they don't already know about them.

[msm...@afterhourscr.com]

I typically recommend Thecus units, they make both rackmount and non-rackmount models.  Reasonably priced compared to "pro-level" stuff, personally I go for 1U or 2U units, but that's just a preference for keeping things neat & tidy on a rack.  Add 4-8 "Enterprise" or "NAS grade" hard drives, run in RAID (5, 6, or 10), ZFS file system, dual redundant PSU's, good firmware updates, they've worked out well for me over the past five or so years.  Using them for media storage (movies, company training videos, etc.), VOIP phone system call recording (have one that stores over 200,000 phone call recordings a year), as nightly on-site backup solution for SQL servers, for recording IP security camera footage, etc.

Whatever unit you go with, always max out the memory before turning it over to the customer.  Memory is so cheap these days it's almost silly not to, and definitely improves performance of the box.

[jga...@afterhourscr.com]

I've had a drobo for about five years now and I love it. However, I made the mistake of formatting as HFS due to running an iMac at the time.  I should have formatted it FAT, but I didn't think there would be an issue. The iMac took a dump and I couldn't read the data via Windows.  I currently have it hooked up to an Ubuntu box mounted in read-only and I mount the drive on my Windows 8 system.  In the future I want to build another NAS and load a linux distro for NAS on it and copy all the data off it then replace the drives and copy back the data.  

I did have an issue with the drobo just slightly outside of the warranty. The fan died and after some email communication they agreed to replace it.  It's going strong still.  One more thing to remember is to get the proper drives.  I got a deal on four WD Green Caviar drives.  If you know WD you'll know they have several colors for different applications.  It runs fine, but I don't want the firmware on the board shutting off spinning for energy purposes.  At times it's taken a while to wake up when it was plugged into the iMac, but since it's mounted in Ubuntu this seems to be resolved as Ubuntu likely sends constant wakeup commands or is constantly reading data.