Best NAS for a good price?

[ch33zw1z]

my xp, "Real" enterprise is SAN, straight storage attached to hosts.

Even the Netapp are typically only NAS CIFS shares in small businesses, at larger corps its FC attached.

theres only IBM, EMC, or Hitachi in the high end enterprise.

This smaller stuff like FreeNAS setups are great for NAS stuff, even smaller businesses.

the difference between the storage can be huge in reliability, redundancy, and of course affordability.

 

[XavierMace]

my xp, "Real" enterprise is SAN, straight storage attached to hosts.

Even the Netapp are typically only NAS CIFS shares in small businesses, at larger corps its FC attached.

theres only IBM, EMC, or Hitachi in the high end enterprise.

If the storage is direct attached to hosts, it's not really a SAN. NetApp's will do NFS, iSCSI, and FC. So will my home setup. So, what's defining the difference between "SAN" and "NAS"? I've always considered it block level vs shares, but as I said, you can do block level on most setups these days.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Right, you know what Im saying.

Ive always kinda gone with what the acronyms stand for.

Call it NAS if its network attached

call it storage or SAN if its FC or FICON attached. directly attached or through switches doesnt really make a difference IMO as the technology still works the same way.

FC vs FICON still has its own differences, but not really something dicussed much.

iSCSI being the oddball, but not something I see in my travels very often.

edit: I am a big fan of Netapp for the midrange. Im a hardware/OS guy, so I cant speak to it like a SAN admin, but Netapp makes a good product IMO.

 

[beginner99]

The consumer stuff is typically low power

Exactly. And small size. If I don't care about size or power, I can just use my main PC as "NAS". Which I have been doing forever. But now I'm in the market for a NAS because all the cable clutter from having tons of harddisks in the main PC is a bit annoying.

 

[ch33zw1z]

I know this sounds like common sense, but make sure that NAS is backed up.

Ive helped two people this year try to recover files off a WD NAS, and of course neither was backed up. I was unsuccessful, due to drive failures going unnoticed.

back it up!! obligatory RAID is not a back up.

 

[Malogeek]

Must be a terrible system if it allows a drive failure to go unnoticed.

 

[beginner99]

back it up!! obligatory RAID is not a back up.

I say just plain avoid RAID in all the prebuilt NAS systems. It's pointless for home-use. Just go with individually drives/volumes and back up everything. RAID isn't back up and if you have a back-up why would you need RAID at all?

 

[ch33zw1z]

RAID is for data availability in the case of hardware failure. I don't use it at home either. 2TB main storage, 2 more 2TB's for off line backups, and ~100GB of critical-never-want-to-lose on some more drives.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Must be a terrible system if it allows a drive failure to go unnoticed.

I agree, garbage. Then they wanted something to store 25TB they had spread across 4 more of the setups just like that, and of course balked at the price tag.