Need a small file server for work

[DrMacintosh]

Hello all, I'm sort of the tech for a small ~8 person consulting company. We take heaps of photos and we're out of SharePoint storage to store them all. Currently we have ~1.7TB of documents, this number will continue to expand and Microsoft charges about $200/TB/M....which is insane. We obviously have to pay that until I get our libraries cleaned out to below 1.13TB total. 

 

Anyway, knowing that most of our data is photos, excel documents, and pdfs..... and that we don't really need to refer to older than current year stuff very often.... I think it would be best if I built some cold storage and moved all those old photos and documents off SharePoint/OneDrive. I could probably swing a budget of $1000, but we'd obviously want to be go as low as possible. 

 

What kind of system should I be looking at here? A NAS? Something self built? 

 

I have a feeling a NAS will do this job well, the question seems to be what brand and if the software allows for remote access by a predetermined set of users (and what networking equipment, if any, might I need to enable that securely?) 

[LIGISTX]

25 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Hello all, I'm sort of the tech for a small ~8 person consulting company. We take heaps of photos and we're out of SharePoint storage to store them all. Currently we have ~1.7TB of documents, this number will continue to expand and Microsoft charges about $200/TB/M....which is insane. We obviously have to pay that until I get our libraries cleaned out to below 1.13TB total. 

 

Anyway, knowing that most of our data is photos, excel documents, and pdfs..... and that we don't really need to refer to older than current year stuff very often.... I think it would be best if I built some cold storage and moved all those old photos and documents off SharePoint/OneDrive. I could probably swing a budget of $1000, but we'd obviously want to be go as low as possible. 

 

What kind of system should I be looking at here? A NAS? Something self built? 

 

I have a feeling a NAS will do this job well, the question seems to be what brand and if the software allows for remote access by a predetermined set of users (and what networking equipment, if any, might I need to enable that securely?) 

Look into synology. You wouldn’t need a very fancy unit, so price should fit within your budget. 

[manikyath]

just get a 4-drive synology, and an external drive for backups. (or a pair of drives to rotate them around)

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, LIGISTX said:

Look into synology. You wouldn’t need a very fancy unit, so price should fit within your budget. 

Synology or QNAP (which I prefer).

 

Also if you don't want to buy hardware but have a cheaper option you could look at other Azure storage options that are cheaper than the SharePoint per GB cost.

[DrMacintosh]

14 hours ago, leadeater said:

Synology or QNAP (which I prefer).

 

Also if you don't want to buy hardware but have a cheaper option you could look at other Azure storage options that are cheaper than the SharePoint per GB cost.

This actually looks really neat, though not huge on the subscription model ($/GB) for cloud storage, but the ease of access and the price at the "cold" tier looks pretty decent.