Advice on large NAS

[bobcooper]

Hi there,

I work for a professional photographer who's storage system needs organising. He needs 20TB+ of storage space that will be backed up automatically. It needs the following:

20TB+ of hot-swappable hard drives that can be extended easily.
Needs to work with Mac computers.
Needs to be fast.

I have no idea about servers, NAS's etc. so would be great to get an idea of what system I should be looking at and if you could point me towards a London / UK based person to help set it up that would be grand!

Thanks,
Bob

 

[travisco_nabisco]

That is quite the amount of storage he is looking at.

My first question is, would a DIY solution be considered? I ask because 20+ TB of NAS storage is going to cost a fair bit and DIY would likely be significantly cheaper.

If you want a desktop NAS the Synology DS1512+ with one or two Synology DX510 expansion chassis is one of the few options. The base 1512+ provides 5 hot-swap drive bays and each of the addition DX510's adds another 5 hot-swap bays. It you buy 3TB drives can get to 24TB of redundant storage with only one add on bay.

If you switch to rack mount then the options open up a lot and I would only recommend that you look at the following manufacturers and see what is best. Synology, Netgear, Thecus, or QNAP.

 

[bobcooper]

Thanks for replying!

I'm certainly willing to consider the diy route, but am a bit daunted because I've never built a computer before, I know the theory but have not put it into practice. I think what I might do is try and make a small media server for home as a practice run and then move on to the bigger rack.

I've also been looking into hard drive arrays and specifically unraid as an option, as being able to add more drives is essential.

I feel quite confident that I could figure out how to put together a desktop, is it much of a step up to building a server / hard drive array?

Thanks again,
Bob

 

[thiggins]

Unless you want to be on the hook for support and are conversant in Linux, buy a commercial NAS. The Synologies suggested would suit your employer fine.

 

[OkayThen]

I have to disagree a lot to the advices given to the original poster in this thread.

Bare with me that I'm not savy with NAS', I've seen some SOHO solutions and a Buffalo 4 drive setup as the biggest.

On the serverside though I've used plenty of big RAID setups to be able to handle big datasets and a speedy and reasonable way.

There's a reason why professional RAID controllers is expensive.



We're talking about a "PROFESSIONAL" photographer.

Nowhere is there any serious consideration about factors like

• How many hours of work does the pictures represent
• How about re-use/selling pictures
• How big amounts of data is the OP working with daily
• What about speed
• Backup (speed/level/security/ .....)
  

Dear OP, try and make a serious list of what and why you want it, then the replies will improve dramatically.


Any serious windows/linux var-seller can put together a proper solution.