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Author Topic: Small office storage  (Read 1103 times)

never_retreat

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Small office storage
« on: July 11, 2011, 11:10:15 PM »
I take care of a friends small office of computers. The server is on the way out.
They really have no need for an actual server. Just some storage for large files.
So 2 questions.
Who makes a good nasd for a good price the is shall we say business grade. Want to be able to have 2 disks mirrored also.
I have a few dlinks, although they have been good for my needs the throughput is a bit slow.

Is there a good software that I can load on desktop computers the will run backups of certain folders to said storage device.

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cordex

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Re: Small office storage
« Reply #1 on: July 11, 2011, 11:29:52 PM »
How many users?  I haven't found an affordable network storage device that I like yet.  My experience with the quad-drive Buffalo systems have been uniformly bad.  Slow and unreliable.  Might not be a big deal as a backup for a couple of systems, but definitely not for more than that.

As to routine backups, I suggest robocopy (Windows) or rsync (Windows/Linux).  Put together a couple of batch files that run a mirrored backup and create a task to run it however often makes you feel comfortable.


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AZRedhawk44

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Re: Small office storage
« Reply #2 on: July 11, 2011, 11:46:49 PM »
xcopy is remarkably full featured if you experiment with all its flags.

As for NAS... I'm in the same boat actually.  I'm looking for a RAID 5 3-disk unit I can load up with 3 x 2TB drives, and publish a NFS volume for my gigabit home network.

Good to hear to stay away from Buffalo. 

At a previous job we were in a pinch for a low cost redundant disk-disk backup solution to augment our tape backups, and found satisfaction with a SansDigital product with a 5-disk RAID array attached via iSCSI to our BackupExec server.
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Bogie

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Re: Small office storage
« Reply #3 on: July 12, 2011, 01:24:55 AM »
You know, I like a screen I can see when things get weird. I've tried network attached devices, and for a bit over the same cash, you can buy a $100 XP Pro machine (or just an empty one for Ubuntu), and use that with as many drives as you can shoehorn in...
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cordex

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Re: Small office storage
« Reply #4 on: July 12, 2011, 11:35:04 AM »
Quote from: Bogie on July 12, 2011, 01:24:55 AM
You know, I like a screen I can see when things get weird. I've tried network attached devices, and for a bit over the same cash, you can buy a $100 XP Pro machine (or just an empty one for Ubuntu), and use that with as many drives as you can shoehorn in...
Bogie is right, and a low-end PC will handle most things much better than most cheap NAS units, albeit with a larger footprint.

However, Windows XP is limited to something like 5 inbound connections.  If you need to access it from more than 5 devices at a time, that becomes a problem.  Also, an add-on raid card is highly recommended.  Many motherboards can handle basic SATA raid functions as well (mirroring, JBOD, etc) but if you want RAID 5, it is often better to get a dedicated card.
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never_retreat

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Re: Small office storage
« Reply #5 on: July 12, 2011, 12:40:20 PM »
Were only talking 4 users. Nothing major.
I want to try to avoid using an actual computer for the job. Just for reliability and idiot proofness. (I don't think thats a word but I'm using it anyway)
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lee n. field

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Re: Small office storage
« Reply #6 on: July 12, 2011, 01:30:27 PM »
Quote from: never_retreat on July 11, 2011, 11:10:15 PM
I take care of a friends small office of computers. The server is on the way out.
They really have no need for an actual server. Just some storage for large files.
So 2 questions.
Who makes a good nasd for a good price the is shall we say business grade. Want to be able to have 2 disks mirrored also.
I have a few dlinks, although they have been good for my needs the throughput is a bit slow.

Is there a good software that I can load on desktop computers the will run backups of certain folders to said storage device.



I sold a customer, a couple years back, a Netgear two drive NAS box.  The only real problem has been getting a network scanner to scan to a folder on it.   

---edit to add--

Which I eventually concluded was probably a quirk with whatever version of Samba the NAS box was using.  I could copy to \\NASbox\share, could not to \\NASbox\share\folder.  Domain authentication.  One manufacturer's printer/scanner could work right with it, another's could not.  My solution was ugly but functional.

Probably this, in an older, smaller capacity version.
« Last Edit: July 12, 2011, 09:46:47 PM by lee n. field »
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never_retreat

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Re: Small office storage
« Reply #7 on: July 12, 2011, 01:40:00 PM »
They have a networked scanner/multifunction machine, the local computers are programmed into the scanner. So you just pick yours from the list and it drops it right to a folder on the users machine.
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