NAS Recommendations

[andyk]

We are looking to add a NAS unit to our network as a central place to store videos, pictures, and other multimedia.

 

I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations as to what unit would do a suitable job?

 

Ideally, we are looking for a 1TB RAID drive that is robust. The plan is to then map these drives to user areas from the NAS.

 

Cost wise, below £300 - I know this is low, but we don't have a huge budget for this.

 

Any recommendations appreciated.

[zag]

Qnap all the way! Great little devices

[ricki]

I like the tera station pro that will intergrate into active directory put after sales support is poor if they go wrong

[tmcd35]

Qnap all the way! Great little devices

 

Having just got one to replace a broke Terastation - I'll second that! QNAP.

[SHimmer45]

got a small linkstation at home is not bad....

used a couple in SOHO/small primaries and there pretty crap....

[fiza]

+1 for QNAP. We have a large NAS unit in place and its excellent.

[achedgy]

HP Microserver, brilliant as a nas

[twin--turbo]

I like the tera station pro that will intergrate into active directory put after sales support is poor if they go wrong

 

I would never buy another Buffalo. They are buggy, the AD intergration is sometimes flakey, the performance on NFS is appauling. We asted £1K on one.

 

PC and a copy of openfiler does a much better job.

 

Rob

[andyk]

Thanks for all of your suggestions guys. I will take a look at them all on Monday!

[JonThompson]

We've just bought a Thecus NAS server and so far, it's working fine.

[MatthewL]

QNAP, they have a huge range if you go on their website.

[seawolf]

I would strongly recommend a FreeNAS system over QNAP, Synology, Drobo, or any of the black box NAS devices. You pay a premium and often get substandard performance with them. Most of them also don't have redundant controllers or PSUs.

 

With FreeNAS, you can either get a pre-built unit from iXsystems if you need or want the commercial support. They have a Microserver version or will build bespoke tower or rack mount systems to your requirements and prices are quite reasonable. They normally use SuperMicro chassis and Intel MB and CPUs. Or, you can roll your own using high quality components and you'll know exactly what you're getting and can get as much performance as your wallet can handle.

 

FreeNAS OS can run on a very small SSD, USB, or Flash card and you can use a combination of SSD and SATA drives for storage. You have the choice of ZFS or UFS storage (ZFS recommended). Services available in FreeNAS include SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, iSCSI, HTTP, FTP,SSH, etc.

[seawolf]

Oh, and FreeNAS integrates easily with AD or LDAP...

 

Your budget is tight for anything reasonable, but you should be able to afford a FreeNAS mini or roll your own Microserver with AMD processor on that budget as well.

Edited July 13, 2013 by seawolf