pgoodyear

Dang, that's way cheaper. I'm for sure going that route. Thanks! I feel like I'm getting close to knowing what I need. Thoughts on FreeNAS vs unRaid or other OS? Any other tips?

Thanks! I feel way more confident about the 32GB of ram now. You mentioned 5 or 10 drives. Did you mean 5 to 10, or are those numbers important for some reason. (I was probably gonna do 8 drives.) Just for my info. What would be required for two computers and a NAS to be connected by RJ45 10gig? I saw 10gig nics that had RJ45 for like $150. And the SFP cards were like $125. Are there other costs that I'm missing? Also, are there performance differences between the two? For extra info, in one PC there is only a single HDD in the other there are three HDD's in RAID 0 (there are SSD boot devices but the HDDs are for video storage and will be the read and write drives in this setup).

I'm perfectly ok with used gear. I want to keep it under $1000 without drives if I can. But it needs to be substantially "better" than the Synology. I'm cool with paying for the 10gig nic's for all three machines (the NAS, my PC, and my employee's). I can get a 2nd gen i5 with 32gb of ram from a guy here in town for like $200. So what if I got that with an LSI card flashed to HBA mode and used 8x 8TB iron wolf drives. Then for networking use a 10gig nic and direct wire both PC's to the NAS preferably using Cat7 (the networking part is what I know the least about). I'd be fine with that hardware investment. But if I could start with 4 drives with the option to upgrade in the future that would be my preferred method, but with my understanding, you can't change zfs once they are up. If I do need a switch, I could get the netgear 8 port 10gig switch. It's $700, but it seems like the cheapest one available.

(Honestly, any help or other suggestions would be greatly appreciated) I've been looking at solutions for my data problems for a long time now. I run a video production company and just hired my first employee. We have a total of 10TB of (non-current) data that is not currently backed up anywhere (terrible I know). In short, I need a NAS. preferably one with 10Gig and with a minimum of 40TB of usable space. Linus has a few videos on NAS building, but not one at this level. The closest one I've seen is the "reliable data storage video" ( synology 8 bay nas that is like $900. I also looked at buying an old server (for tons of ECC memory, but I have limited server hardware experience) or repurposing an old PC (32GB Ram and i5, but I'd know what I'm). I would love it if I could buy the basics and add drives as we go, because dropping $2000 on drives at once is always a hard pill to swallow. In an ideal world, I could have a nas that has 4 drives installed and I can keep adding to it up to like 100TB or more. Any budget solutions people have? How important is more than 32gb of ram? How important is ECC? Could an old server work? Would a 2nd gen i5 with 32gb of ram be ok? Or should I just bite the bullet and go with an off the shelf Synology that people say works well? But if I can go with an old server, what are the things I should watch out for? Should I ZFS or RAID (or something else)? PS... (I was looking at a board like this on ebay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/SuperMicro-Super-X8DTI-F-Mother-Board-Dual-Intel-XEON-E5630-2-53GHz/222922713188?_trkparms=aid%3D111001%26algo%3DREC.SEED%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D51377%26meid%3De1f8ee33477f4e37a1b3b836e671efbd%26pid%3D100675%26rk%3D6%26rkt%3D15%26sd%3D123086324973%26itm%3D222922713188&_trksid=p2481888.c100675.m4236&_trkparms=pageci%3A7747ec54-48b6-11e8-8080-74dbd180e117|parentrq%3Afe107aca1620ab6ac9bc7176fff22523|iid%3A1 )