Best NAS for SMB use?

[FatalSaviour]

Hi all,

We've just bought a small office to house some of our web-designers. The guy in charge wants a NAS box, to store all important data. If possible, it would also be nice to store a backup of all data from our main office here too, as off-site storage is something we've been looking at for a while now.

He's suggested this and using RAID 5 at the moment, but I was wondering whether anyone had any experience of either this particular model, or could recommend a more suitable solution?

(He does have 2x 1TB drives spare at the moment if it makes a difference, as he originally bought a Netgear SC101T NAS box but it turned out only to be compatible with Vista 32 Bit and not 64 Bit (apparently) although they can be returned if necessary.

Thanks all!

[FatalSaviour]

Anybody?

[GoNz0]

if your going to spend that much buy a thecus, 5200BR or 5200BR pro springs to mind (as i own a BR )

thats a real nas (but you have to buy the disks on top)

[Blastuk]

the sharespace only accepts wd drives apparently

[FatalSaviour]

The Thecus' look really rather good, and I think it might be prudent to buy two, one for our main office in England and the other in Sweden, and have them backing up each other overnight as well.

Would someone be able to confirm whether or not the N5200 Roustor here would take 1TB drives?

(I'm not being lazy - honest. The latest HDD compatibility report that I can find here would seem to suggest that it can. However, I just wanted to make sure first, before buying 2 NAS units and 6 hard drives!)

[GoNz0]

i run the F1 samsung 1TB drives in mine, if you can afford it then its worth adding a spare drive to each just incase one dies, it will then auto rebuild using the spare. just make sure your on the latest firmware for the thecus

[FatalSaviour]

That's super thanks Gonzo - I'd completely overlooked the 'spare' function :S, but that would be ideal. 8HDs between them then it is!

Is spending the extra for the PRO really worth it? I'm positive I don't need the multiple RAID feature, and not sure how beneficial the ISCSI support would be - does this make a big difference?
Money's not really an object at the moment, but that doesn't mean I'm inclined to waste it!

Please forgive my ignorance - this has all been a bit sudden, and I'm learning as quickly as possible!

[aidanjt]

http://www.scan.ie/Products/Synology...ver-All-in-One
Compatible with pretty much any system with a CIFS implimentation and a web browser, which goes for just about any OS you're likely to come across, that and a few hard drives in RAID5 would do the job. You can get other synology models with more processing power but this does the job really. Oh, and it has built in web development stuff like a web server, php, mysql, etc.. Good value for money imho.

[GoNz0]

tbh u only need the pro if you want iscsi to mount more than 1 raid system on the box, mines got plenty of punch to it, i did upgrade the ram from 256mb to 1gb, but it doesnt use more than 220mb usually

[FatalSaviour]

tbh u only need the pro if you want iscsi to mount more than 1 raid system on the box, mines got plenty of punch to it, i did upgrade the ram from 256mb to 1gb, but it doesnt use more than 220mb usually

It's nice to know you can upgrade it though....can I confirm that it's just plain standard DDR 400 RAM (or is it ECC?)

[GoNz0]

it can be picky but im using none ecc 1gb Kingston KVR400X64C3A/1G