NAS

[MegaMech]

Hello,

 

I want to get a NAS for a tax office and I'm looking for suggestions.
Want to spend around 400-500 dollars. Surprised how much manufacturers charge for a tin box with no drives.

I can get 2X 3TB drives for 300 bucks (WD Red)
And a cheap box for 100-250 bucks. Want to use raid 1 (mirror)

Any suggestions? The office also has 2 noisy old servers that aren't used anymore.

Is raid worth it? Is it safe enough to just have 1 drive with no backup. We would be working off of the NAS all the time. Computers are satellites, they hold the software but no data. Seems kinda pointless to buy one of the ~300 dollar NAS that come with 1 hard drive

[SCHISCHKA]

6 minutes ago, MegaMech said:

Is it safe enough to just have 1 drive with no backup.

If I only had two drives i would rather use one as a nightly backup than have raid1. Raid1 does not protect you from lighting, fire, or theft.

[TheGlenlivet]

4 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

If I only had two drives i would rather use one as a nightly backup than have raid1. Raid1 does not protect you from lighting, fire, or theft.

Or viruses, corruption etc etc.  Good point.

Raid 1 is a good idea for the back up drive that gets data stored on it nightly. 

The day to day would be best off an SSD if you can afford it. 

[SCHISCHKA]

1 minute ago, TheGlenlivet said:

Raid 1 is a good idea for the back up drive that gets data stored on it nightly. 

use an incremental backup so you can restore old versions and deleted files. Using RAID 1 as a form of backup will take longer to rebuild an array over incremental backups.

[paddy-stone]

Completely agree. If, as in this instance this is your livelihood you're backing up and AFAIK by law you have to keep records etc and have them securely held.. then I would most likely spend a bit more on the actual "box" as you put it and make sure the hardware is sound. How many people will be working off the NAS at the same time? as that could effect performance, depending on the hardware chosen. Anyway, I would at the very least suggest backing up the NAS using a sync program of some sort, so that you can specify it looks for time and date to mirror across to the USB 3.0 backup drive or something that you can take home with you maybe? and of course be encrypted... and in turn I would most likely then backup that drive to my home NAS or whatever... in case of fire/theft etc. The backups should be fairly quick as it would only be copying across data that has changed.

[geo3]

5 hours ago, SCHISCHKA said:

If I only had two drives i would rather use one as a nightly backup than have raid1. Raid1 does not protect you from lighting, fire, or theft.

... or a Virus, or file-system corruption, or accidental deletion or overwriting the files with bad data. 

[kerradeph]

What kind of servers are the ones that you already have there? Unless they are properly ancient you could probably use them as a storage server. Also, tax office? I feel like you will be obligated to have better availability and reliability than a single bargain bin box with a couple of drives.