Small Commercial NAS vs. Consumer Desktop Whitebox Fileserver
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What is the intended use?
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Archival storage of files that aren't actively used, but might be used in the future. From today until who knows when.
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The goal is reliability of storing the data for the long term, with annual additions to the "share".
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Option
None of the above. -
You could do option two but use enterprise hardware. You can get inexpensive Dell servers from xByte for very little.
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Oh believe me, I know a true data storage solution would be best.
Maybe I can get management to see that renting storage from Amazon S3 is way more viable.
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Products I would use for a scenario like this include and ARE limited to:
- Synology and/or IOSafe two bay NAS enclosure (paging @Brett-at-ioSafe )
- Netgear ReadyNAS two bay NAS enclosure
Both RAID 1, both business class, both flexible, powerful and cheap. Literally nothing else I would look at or consider.
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What is the exact "use case" of the storage? Archival, backup, live user data, etc.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Archival storage of files that aren't actively used, but might be used in the future. From today until who knows when.
So cold storage. What is the backup plan for them?
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For cold storage like this, ignoring the chassis itself, the ideal drive configuration is RAID 1 with WD Red drives. High density, low performance, low power draw, long shelf life, spin down options, low cost with no unnecessary features that cannot be used in the scenario. You could shave a couple of bucks with WD Green drives, but I would likely not bother (but I might in a pinch.) RAID 1 is ideal as the speed of RAID 10 is not beneficial and RAID 1 is the safest possible option and the lowest cost both for the drives as well as for the chassis.
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So the issue is, the data might get used some time in the future, because a client might come back and say "hey we need this updated".
Using cold storage like Amazon S3, we'd completely remove the data locally, and let Amazon maintain the infrastructure. We only annually will upload stuff from our network to said service.
Do we need a separate backup solution to a service such as Amazon S3?
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@DustinB3403 said:
Using cold storage like Amazon S3, we'd completely remove the data locally, and let Amazon maintain the infrastructure. We only annually will upload stuff from our network to said service.
S3 is hot storage. What you want from the Amazon world is Glacier. So called because it is slow, cold storage.
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BackBlaze has a new offering that should compete with this too. But it is new and I am not sure that I would even offer it as an option. I would stick to Glacier as my only hosted storage option here.
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How much data are we talking about, BTW?
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@DustinB3403 said:
Do we need a separate backup solution to a service such as Amazon S3?
Not generally, no.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Products I would use for a scenario like this include and ARE limited to:
- Synology and/or IOSafe two bay NAS enclosure (paging @Brett-at-ioSafe )
- Netgear ReadyNAS two bay NAS enclosure
Both RAID 1, both business class, both flexible, powerful and cheap. Literally nothing else I would look at or consider.
What's wrong with Buffalo - not that I"m a fan, just wondering?
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2TB of Data currently.
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Well, then you really need two devices in different locations for archival storage.
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Amazon Glacier is $14/Month for 2TB of storage, that seems incredibly cheap.
How is access to the data?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Products I would use for a scenario like this include and ARE limited to:
- Synology and/or IOSafe two bay NAS enclosure (paging @Brett-at-ioSafe )
- Netgear ReadyNAS two bay NAS enclosure
Both RAID 1, both business class, both flexible, powerful and cheap. Literally nothing else I would look at or consider.
What's wrong with Buffalo - not that I"m a fan, just wondering?
They would certainly be my "next" choice if I did not have those two. The range, support and everything from the "big two" is just excellent. I've had good luck with Buffalo support (and bad luck with Buffalo sales) and their devices are decent, but they are a small player and don't offer the range and expertise that the two main players do.
