Setting Up a Small Business NAS Solution

[starealms]

I am currently trying to figure out a network solution for my bosses’ small business. He needs a way for 2 computers to work off shared large photos and documents. He also wants to be able to  back up files he’s worked on and store off-site. Currently, he is running a QNAP of (2) 5 TB hard drives, but finds the speed too slow to load the large files he works on. 1 of the hard drives is mirroring the working one (running RAID1). I know there’s a couple options, including having an nvme as dedicated cache. 
 

What would be a better solution to have more and faster storage for both computers to access before taking a backup of files off-site?

[Electronics Wizardy]

What speeds are you getting?  Try running a disk benchmark to see what your current speeds are?

 

What model NAS?

 

How big are these files?

 

What is your network speeds and config?

 

What is your budget?

 

Going SSDS and 10GBe may speed things up, but its hard to say without knwoing more about why its slow now.

 

 

[Bdavis]

I run a true as system with two 7.68 TB SSDs in raid 1 at my business. You're probably not going to get the kind of responsiveness you're looking for with hard drives.

 

The amount of storage you need, and budget will determine what you purchase. I run another truenas system at my house and my two systems back up to each other nightly over a VPN.

[m9x3mos]

On 6/23/2025 at 7:41 PM, Bdavis said:

I run a true as system with two 7.68 TB SSDs in raid 1 at my business. You're probably not going to get the kind of responsiveness you're looking for with hard drives.

 

The amount of storage you need, and budget will determine what you purchase. I run another truenas system at my house and my two systems back up to each other nightly over a VPN.

I would agree at least not with only 2 hdds. I run mine with 6 and even with 7 vms all hitting it and a sql server, response times are pretty good. I don't see disk latency go above 100ms at worst.