Can't make up my mind

[jay]

Here's my situation:
Our servers have a combined total capacity of around 1.2 TB. I would like some sort of NAS that would have enough capacity to store full/incremental backups, ideally reaching back two or more months.

My first thought was to buy 8 1.5 TB drives and a motherboard with 8 SATA ports, build a DIY NAS with an as-yet undetermined operating system. This seems to be one of the cheapest options, the only 8 bay NASes I've been able to find are significantly more expensive than self built. Does anyone know if, say, ASUS motherboards are able to do RAID 5 with all 8 drives or is there some sort of limit?

Another option would be to get four D-Link DNS-323 or something similar (2 bay NAS) and load them up with 1.5 TB drives. I'd really like to have all the capacity available as one large volume, mind you. Might this be possible with DFS or something similar? If so, it would be nice to simply add more DNS-323s or similar devices as our storage needs increase,

This is a big world to dive into and I don't want to make my decision too hastily. Any pointers would be appreciated.

Thank you

 

[bookmage]

My question on the backups boils down to what OS do you want to run and how comfortable/experienced are you with that? What type of backups are you running? If you want easy windows backups, Windows Home Server functions beautifully for that and results in easy backups. For just straight Windows backups, I stuck 8TB in a WHS box which gives me about 4TB of actual space to use. If you just need straight storage space, then either Linux or Windows server would work using SMB/CIFS. Since I'm guessing you are managing these servers, you want to make sure you can handle any problems that might come up, such as: hard drive failure, other hardware failure, data corruption, and what nots... WHS drives are readable on any other computer and probably easiest to recover from. Linux can offer more features but takes more time/effort to setup and manage.

Most motherboards with built in ports only offer software RAID or fakeRAID. I would use Linux software RAID 5/6 and pick up a motherboard with all the ports I could get in the right size. If I just wanted 8-10 drives, I would use the onboard ports + the AOC-SAT2-MV8 stuck in a good case on an energy efficient motherboard+cpu. My next build will be a miniNAS based on an Atom dual core w/8x2.5in drives. Should fit in a real small box...

Prebuilt NAS take a lot of the guesswork out for a price. I have been happy with the Netgear/Infrant ReadyNAS line and the HP WHS server. I also use a Promise 4bay NAS and a Calvary 4bay NAS for basic file sharing. They don't offer much for performance, so they're used for backing up files from other servers... they were cheap and simple to manage, but they don't offer much feature.

Since I want the balance between space and drive failure, I look at 4+drives. A 2bay would require either mirroring the 2 drives or backing up the data to somewhere else which can be more work...

 

[mamexp]

For backup only meaning no frequent data accessing, there is a simple solution: Unraid. Its cheap, simple and extremely easy to setup. You can increase the size of backup storage as you go (no need to get 8 1.5tb at once- saving cost).

The only cons is its not the fastest Nas setup available. But it does exactly what you need.... incremental back-up.

For more reliable and faster solution, i recommend OpenSolaris with RaidZ2. It would be considerably more expensive to setup. You need true 64bit processors, along with at least 4gb ECC of Ram and PCI-Express raid card (altho PCI-X would still work). Obviously this requires a workstation/server board.

Those are my .02