I Need A Quality NAS for A Small Business

Here's the lowdown:

At the office, we have a USB drive that's hooked into a Mac X Serve which is then utilized by the network IP for a NAS solution.

We're at the point where we are going to be having growing pains due to the amount of space (closing in on 1TB).

The easiest solution would be a larger USB drive (low cost).
Then there is buying an actual business-quality NAS (read: a device I can trust).
After that, the next best option I can find is putting in 2TB drives into the actual server. I'd like to avoid this due to cost ($550ish each) and quantity needed (at least 2 for RAID, then a RAID-ed backup means 4) (expensive).

I think it's high time we put a quality NAS in place, yet I can't find details on what comes highly recommended, why, and what I should really be careful about as well.

We are concerned about cost, but more so about quality and storage space.

Hope that's enough to get some recommendations or at least some sort of conversation going.

Update - Sept 4th, 2011: Ended up going with the Synology DS411+II High Performance NAS Server with Data Protection - so far, so good

I like the NetGear Ultra line of NAS.

A variety of models based around how many drive bays you want.

Automatic RAID 5 with hot-swappable drives.

You can pick the size of drive to put in as well as the number to manage costs and then add/upgrade the drives as you require more space.

I've been using the Ultra-4 at home for a while now as a media and backup server and it's been painless.

Simple plug into your network and play.

Pricey but worth it: Drobo. You can even get a month demo unit for free. I love the simplicity of the Drobos. If not, grab a Synology.

Edwin wrote:

Pricey but worth it: Drobo. You can even get a month demo unit for free. I love the simplicity of the Drobos. If not, grab a Synology.

I have a Drobo FS. I love the simplicity, and am reasonably happy with it overall, but I'm not very happy with the network performance. It's enough for my uses (streaming to a media server), but it's quite a bit slower than it should be on gigabit ethernet. I've heard much better results with the newer USB/thunderbolt ones, I fear the processor in the FS is just not up to maxing out the network.

Everything I've heard about Drobo is they are good but very very slow.

Eep, not drobo!

I went through three of them under warranty replacement and they are terribly slow.

Synology rocks. Twice the throughput on a single 1gb nic as drobo and some of them do nic teaming. Great apps, easy to configure, and very smart. For example: it has a web interface and if you are working with it on one IP and change the network config such that it gets a new IP, it will redirect your current tab to the new IP! I teamed the nics on mine and when it does so, it creates a third nic, which there is no way to know what the mac is, and no idea what IP it would grab, so I thought I was going to have to find a router to plug it into to find it, but it simply redirected my firefox tab. Awesome.

The new drobos (5D, Mini) use a much faster processor and more RAM making them faster than the old ones.

I've been debating buy a NAS for home later this year and I've been going back and forth between Drobo and Synology/QNAP. I really like how fault tolerant and upgradable Drobos are (upgrading many other NAS devices is a nightmare) but yeah, the speed of them is terrible given the price point and I have to read more reviews but I'm not sure if the new ones really can hold up against Synology there either. I plan to put enough storage into this thing that I hopefully won't need to upgrade it for years but I wish the non-Drobo manufacturers had an easy way to put in bigger drives without moving everything off the NAS and back on.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

I've been debating buy a NAS for home later this year and I've been going back and forth between Drobo and Synology/QNAP. I really like how fault tolerant and upgradable Drobos are (upgrading many other NAS devices is a nightmare) but yeah, the speed of them is terrible given the price point and I have to read more reviews but I'm not sure if the new ones really can hold up against Synology there either. I plan to put enough storage into this thing that I hopefully won't need to upgrade it for years but I wish the non-Drobo manufacturers had an easy way to put in bigger drives without moving everything off the NAS and back on.

Not sure I'm following you there. By upgrading, you mean adding/removing/swapping disks? You can do that with synology, I did it just now to a live volume in a production environment as a test to make sure I wasn't giving false info. You need to go into the storage manager, manage the volume you're working with and add/remove disks as wanted there. No different than drobo.

Edit: Clarification: I had a 4disk volume of 1tb drives and I added a 5th 1tb drive to the volume. It is still in the process of adding the disk but the shares are still accessible during this expanding phase.

ibdoomed wrote:
Parallax Abstraction wrote:

I've been debating buy a NAS for home later this year and I've been going back and forth between Drobo and Synology/QNAP. I really like how fault tolerant and upgradable Drobos are (upgrading many other NAS devices is a nightmare) but yeah, the speed of them is terrible given the price point and I have to read more reviews but I'm not sure if the new ones really can hold up against Synology there either. I plan to put enough storage into this thing that I hopefully won't need to upgrade it for years but I wish the non-Drobo manufacturers had an easy way to put in bigger drives without moving everything off the NAS and back on.

Not sure I'm following you there. By upgrading, you mean adding/removing/swapping disks? You can do that with synology, I did it just now to a live volume in a production environment as a test to make sure I wasn't giving false info. You need to go into the storage manager, manage the volume you're working with and add/remove disks as wanted there. No different than drobo.

Edit: Clarification: I had a 4disk volume of 1tb drives and I added a 5th 1tb drive to the volume. It is still in the process of adding the disk but the shares are still accessible during this expanding phase.

What I mean is that say I have 4x1TB drives and want to upgrade to 4x2TB drives. With a Drobo, you just pull out a drive, put in the new one, wait for it to rebuild, repeat with the other 3 (this is part of their patented unique selling point as I understand it). At least as I've understood it to this point with other NAS devices, you can't replace a drive with one of a different size as that breaks the RAID. So if you want to replace all the drives to get more space, you have to copy all the data off it, replace the drives, create a new array and move everything back. Is that not the case any longer?

Parallax Abstraction wrote:
ibdoomed wrote:
Parallax Abstraction wrote:

I've been debating buy a NAS for home later this year and I've been going back and forth between Drobo and Synology/QNAP. I really like how fault tolerant and upgradable Drobos are (upgrading many other NAS devices is a nightmare) but yeah, the speed of them is terrible given the price point and I have to read more reviews but I'm not sure if the new ones really can hold up against Synology there either. I plan to put enough storage into this thing that I hopefully won't need to upgrade it for years but I wish the non-Drobo manufacturers had an easy way to put in bigger drives without moving everything off the NAS and back on.

Not sure I'm following you there. By upgrading, you mean adding/removing/swapping disks? You can do that with synology, I did it just now to a live volume in a production environment as a test to make sure I wasn't giving false info. You need to go into the storage manager, manage the volume you're working with and add/remove disks as wanted there. No different than drobo.

Edit: Clarification: I had a 4disk volume of 1tb drives and I added a 5th 1tb drive to the volume. It is still in the process of adding the disk but the shares are still accessible during this expanding phase.

What I mean is that say I have 4x1TB drives and want to upgrade to 4x2TB drives. With a Drobo, you just pull out a drive, put in the new one, wait for it to rebuild, repeat with the other 3 (this is part of their patented unique selling point as I understand it). At least as I've understood it to this point with other NAS devices, you can't replace a drive with one of a different size as that breaks the RAID. So if you want to replace all the drives to get more space, you have to copy all the data off it, replace the drives, create a new array and move everything back. Is that not the case any longer?

Correct, that is no longer the case. With drobo you can just pull it and put in a bigger one. With synology, you need to click through storage management and remove the disk, sizes don't matter, raids don't break. So same results either way: drobo = no clicky clicky; synology: 10 clicky clickys. (I didn't actually count as a few clicks didn't bother me.)

Disclaimer: I'm using the DS1812+ with synology hybrid raid (SHR) so if there's a synology that doesn't have such feature, my descriptions may not apply but even the tiny 2 disk unit has SHR.

OK, that is fantastic! I can't believe I've missed that when I've researched options. I was actually planning to wait and buy a 4 or 5 disk unit simply so I could put more storage capacity in it right off the bat. If that upgrade capability is there, I can probably go with a 2 disk model now. Thanks a ton, made me day!

So what, then, would be the recommended setup for wanting to have at least 4 TB of data, with hardware failure protection, with an easy-to-perform growth plan?

Do you have a good backup system? That's what you need to be focused on first, or as part of the project. RAID is not backup; it protects against downtime from drive failure. That can be important for a business, but there are a zillion ways you can lose data that don't involve a disk failure. Only backups protect you from those.

If you don't presently have backups, your #1 priority before you do ANYTHING else is to get that data onto another volume for safekeeping.

It is currently backed up, but once we upgrade space, that all changes since our backup drive is the same size.

I use a synology 411 series, love it.

Make sure to periodically back up the raid array to an external drive and store that puppy off site.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

OK, that is fantastic! I can't believe I've missed that when I've researched options. I was actually planning to wait and buy a 4 or 5 disk unit simply so I could put more storage capacity in it right off the bat. If that upgrade capability is there, I can probably go with a 2 disk model now. Thanks a ton, made me day! :)

Consdering the ds411 is just over $300 which isn't even $100 more than the 2disk units... I'd recommend going with the 4...

For everyone: I highly recommend setting up shadow volumes or some alternative to give versioning as well. I run into that all the time, someone calls because they saved over a file... sigh.

After reading up on things, it looks like I'll be putting in a request for a pair of Synology DS411+II High Performance NAS Server with Data Protection systems, each with 4 x 3TB drives. One for day-to-day, NAS. The other for a backup system of the NAS. These have built-in remote-backup support (to USB, NAS, etc) and also support backing up to Amazon S3, so remote backup may not be as far-flung-a-future as it might seem.

Not being a full-fledged, Linux guru sysadmin, these seem right up my alley.

Sure, it's a little more than they expected to spend, but isn't it always?

Update: My manager was not thrilled with the price, but upper management approved it and they'll be here early next week.

Irony is thick like the humidity in florida.

I had a drobo firewire'd to a mac server for the last month or so doing time machine and suddenly, it no longer communicates with THAT mac... other macs, sure, no sweat... but not this one. And it's not the firewire port, other drives work fine. I'm throwing this thing out the !#$*@!^# window.

Did the Mac server restart before the Drobo disconnected? I had that happen on a Drobo DAS connected to my Mac server when the UPS went haywire and decided to shut down. Turns out it corrupted the file used to communicate between the two. Ended up getting my data back after a lot of headache, sent the Drobo back to Amazon and picked up a Synology DS411J.

Nope, no mac server restarting involved.

ibdoomed wrote:

Correct, that is no longer the case. With drobo you can just pull it and put in a bigger one. With synology, you need to click through storage management and remove the disk, sizes don't matter, raids don't break. So same results either way: drobo = no clicky clicky; synology: 10 clicky clickys. (I didn't actually count as a few clicks didn't bother me.)

Disclaimer: I'm using the DS1812+ with synology hybrid raid (SHR) so if there's a synology that doesn't have such feature, my descriptions may not apply but even the tiny 2 disk unit has SHR.

I need to revise my description above, there's an extra step in there on the synology. I just had a real world test of replacing a 1tb disk with a 2tb disk. There's no removing it from the storage manager first, you just yank the drive, put in its replacement and synology tells you the raid is degraded and you click ok, check the box for the new drive, and done, it rebuilds.

The current scenario is that I told Drobo "You have failed me for the last time." It is full of 2tb drives that I want to move into the synology to replace those 1tb drives. So I yanked the first drive from Drobo and let it rebuild. It took 10.... TEN... hours... snore... when I put that drive in synology in place of a 1tb, synology didn't give me a timer, it gave me a % complete down to the hundreths and took an hour. After drobo was happy again, I yanked the second drive (of an original 16tb pool where 2.1tb is used) and it's currently saying 27 hours to rebuild and keeps going up.

TLDR: Synology procedure for replacing smaller drive with larger: Yank the smaller, insert larger, click about 4 times through the interface, wait for rebuilding to complete.

ibdoomed wrote:

TLDR: Synology procedure for replacing smaller drive with larger: Yank the smaller, insert larger, click about 4 times through the interface, wait for rebuilding to complete.

Nice. Sorely tempted to sell the Drobo and move to one of these sometime, don't have the cash to do so at the moment, unfortunately. Looking at their site, it seems it will be pretty expensive to replace my current 5-drive Drobo.

Ranger Rick wrote:

Nice. Sorely tempted to sell the Drobo and move to one of these sometime, don't have the cash to do so at the moment, unfortunately. Looking at their site, it seems it will be pretty expensive to replace my current 5-drive Drobo.

Yeah it looks like the 5bay is ~$800 while the 8bay is only a couple hundred more. Since they do 4tb drive support now, I bet you could get away with the 4bay ds411j for $350 and move 4 of the 5 drives for now, upgrade later... but if your drobo is working and just slow...

You guys are great. I was coming to the tech forum to ask basically the same question. Off to order a Synology I go...

So far, I'm really liking the DS411+II - they're going to see their first real day of mass usage today, hoping all goes well.

trueheart78 wrote:

So far, I'm really liking the DS411+II - they're going to see their first real day of mass usage today, hoping all goes well.

Good luck!

I saw this review of the ds1512 on kitguru earlier. Warning they have a lot of ads but no popups I'm aware of.

Getting the Storage Spaces on Win2012 configured this weekend. Then I'll migrate the data from the WHS to the Win12 box and use the WHS as a backup for the Win12 box. About 30TB between the two boxes but I shouldn't lose sh|t.