Which NAS setup to use

nelist1 · November 7, 2017

Hey,

Generally I'm pretty good with computers, both hardware and software. This is just one area I have nil experience in.

For a small business I'm asked to setup a NAS. I'm just not sure what option to go with. The business mainly uses it as a central storage for 8 low end computers in order to be able to work on documents and occasionally do some photoshopping/filmediting. They had a netgear setup but it broke down.

Now i have access to 2 Seagate Barracuda 2TB's (they used to run them in RAID 1), and a very old computer (as in 2000 I guess, havent had the time to inspect it yet). And I've been asked to select and fix the best price/value solution for them

As far as I can see I have 3 options: I can buy a prebuilt NAS from a company like Synology and pop the available Barracudas in there (and possibly 2 more for more speed and storage in something like a RAID 10 setup).

Or I can spend as little as possible on the bare minimals and install FreeNAS on the old PC, using as much available old hardware as possible.

Or I can spend a lot more and build a NAS from the ground up with either FreeNAS or a paid alternative, for a lot more flexibility and quality. Preferably with new WB RED's. Excluding the drives I would guess this to cost around $400 with the research I've done so far?

I'm just wondering what you guys think is the best value/

Additionally I was wondering whether it is worth investing in server grade hardware for the pupose of this build. I would guess not but I would love to have it confirmed

Thanks a lot

KenjiUmino · November 7, 2017

55 minutes ago, nelist1 said:

They had a netgear setup but it broke down.

looks like netgear kinda sucks.

i only get 100mbit-level transfer speed with my netgear NAS on a gigabit connection.

57 minutes ago, nelist1 said:

Or I can spend as little as possible on the bare minimals and install FreeNAS on the old PC, using as much available old hardware as possible.

if the hardware you can play with is year 2000-ish the transfer speeds will probably suck harder than on my netgear NAS.

what did we have in 2000? a pentium 3 was the shizz and more than 128-256mb RAM was considered overkill. i did run a pentium 3 as a network file storage but it wasn't great.

if the hardware you have is a tad newer ... like a hyperthreaded pentium 4, core 2 or athlon 64 x2 things look a lot better.

you may have 2-4 SATA ports on board, you can stuff 2-3gigs of RAM in there and there's a chance of getting real gigabit ethernet.

Oxydoreduction · November 7, 2017

2 hours ago, nelist1 said:

Additionally I was wondering whether it is worth investing in server grade hardware for the pupose of this build. I would guess not but I would love to have it confirmed

Well I would say for a small business, yes, but nothing overkill.

As Kenji said, it also depends on the hardware you have, pentium 4 or newer will be ok to use but use new hard drives and keep the old ones for backup.