NAS for Primary School (~400 students, 20 FTE staff)

[baztech]

Our district provided server will be removed next year as they district has transitioned to cloud document storage. Our dilemma is that we have approx 2TB of video/photos/files that don't play nice in Sharepoint 2010.Does anyone have any recommendations for a file server or NAS to meet our needs?We would have, at peak, 30 concurrent connections (i.e. one class) connecting over the wireless. It'd need to support our Windows AD for authentication. QNAP seems good but I've never used one in a our setting so I want to make sure it'll be applicable for our school's needs.

[3s-gtech]

IME, Synology. I have three Synology DS units in use currently - the AD integration is solid, they're quick and stable and the software is ace. You pay a little more for them, but you get great kit as a result.

 

I also have a selection of Netgear, Iomega and Buffalo units too, and I'd rank them in that order - the Netgears are good too.

[MatthewL]

Cannot fault QNAP, very good bits of kit.

[Tallwood_6]

Qnap is better hardware for the money software is good, synôlogy slightly better software in terms of polish at least but hardware spec for the cash not quite so great.

[Gardinho]

You're splitting hairs between the qnap and the synology nas drives.

 

As has been suggested, the QNAP hardware is slightly better, but the Synology software as quite a bit better. IMO the QNAP software is poor in comparison. I find it buggy.

 

The other benefit to the Synology is the hybrid raid feature, which allows you to put different sized & different branded disks into it. I think this is an awesome feature as if/when drives fail the storage can be increased.

 

We've got 2 QNAP ts419 and 1 Synology DS414.

[Oddbod]

Been on drobo raid for a while now, tied up 20Tb on them with little issue. The beyond raid partition system is great, it's like the synology hybrid raid, but seems to work better and the heal thy self software has recovered disks that killed the qnap! Connections are esata, thunderbolt, FireWire or Ethernet. Do check prior to ordering, the newer units come with a flash storage area for regularly accessed data.

I have two drobo five slot FireWire units daisy chained for server raid, with space available for 30Tb, a drobo four slot FireWire with raid space of 20Tb.

[dhicks]

Does anyone have any recommendations for a file server or NAS to meet our needs?

 

Might you do best to simply buy a server and either install Windows Server on it (I don't know what your Microsoft Licensing situation is, so that might be a cheap option or not), or install OpenFiler or similar, or simply set up a Samba file server?