NAS boxs

[Newton]

Im thinking of using a NAS box to expand the storage on my school network as the file server is getting low on space (and teachers never clean it up). Never having used one I was woundering how easy they are to set up and manage, and does anyone have any recomendations, looking at about 1Tb

 

 

Id want it to be easy to set and hopefuly intergrate with a Win2003 AD, I guess its a case of giving the box a IP address setting up its shares and refering to them as \\IPAddress\sharename

 

I can't see the load on the box being that heavey as its a small Primary school.

 

This isnt to be used as a back up and installing a second drive in the server isnt an option at this time

 

Thanks

[sparkeh]

Hmm just purchased a Terrastation Pro 2gb from CPLTD- reasonable price, integrates with AD or use as a straight share, disk mirroring, jobs a good'un.

[Hightower]

Just bought 4 x 500gb HDD's, going in 2 workstations (just old P4's with 512 RAM) to make 2 x 1tb NAS boxes (using FreeNAS).

 

Been using FreeNAS for a year now with no problems.

[Newton]

Intresting Idea.... will look into it

 

Cheers

[AWicher]

Big-up to freenas, use it at home. For my school we have 2 of them Dell £99 servers (Offer ended)

put 2 1TB drives and installed openfiler, then setup iscsi for all the servers.

 

Good vid on setting up on itidiots.com or via itunes.

[Jamman960]

Make sure you have a good look at reviews before buying a purpose built NAS box, some suffer from low transfer rates. I'd also be weary of what file system is being used, ideally you'd want to be able to pull the drives and stick them in virtually any pc/server etc to recover the data from them should the box itself die.

 

For now I've stuck with FreeNas

[ozzy]

Another vote for the Terastation's here we've had two for long time now and never had any problems with them, AD integration is quite easy to set up or you can just sit them on the network as storage for video, pic's, large files ect.

[HodgeHi]

i have recently been looking at a drobo for home use. They seem to be pretty cool and simple to use. A network sharing device can be added to the box as well. Not sure how it would perform in a school environment though. Would be interesting to see.

[Hightower]

Just to add to mine, I've just this minute set the FreeNAS up and it works a treat with AD integration etc etc. Time to set the other one up, using a special feature - rsync.

 

What it does it mirrors another machine, so my second machine is going to be an exact clone of the first - a backup of a backup.

[Newton]

Just had a quick play with Freenas, seams good couldnt get it working first time, maybe I should read the manual....Left the site now will have another play when back there

[Hightower]

Just had a quick play with Freenas, seams good couldnt get it working first time, maybe I should read the manual....Left the site now will have another play when back there

 

I remember last year when I set one up for the first time, I had to read the manual a little to understand it. But when I did another one today it was a doddle and knew exactly what I had to do so I think it's one of those things that is fairly quick and easy to get your head around.

[john]

I've got about 4 or 5 terrastations now and two are starting to die off, I think I will bin the boxes and keep the drives and try a FreeNAS option. I've got a couple of rack server cases free and they have boards in them of a low quality so would probably be ok for the job. A job for the next time I have a gap in time (not that I get them really, hey ho will be another Sunday then)