On 4/7/2013 8:07 PM, Joshua Elliott wrote: > Hey PLUG, I've been lurking for a while and now I've got a question for you. > > I need to put together some sort of NAS solution, mostly for my wife's > photography business, but also for some of my own accumulated bits. I need > some redundancy, but nothing crazy, so I would be just fine with raid 1... > unless somebody convinces me that I need more than that. So what would be > the best (economical, durable, expandable) way to get that? Roll my own? > Pre-built? Cloud? > > Thanks for your wise words (even the off-topic ones), > > Personally we just have a machine with a RAID card (Areca specifically, love those things) and a bunch of drives in RAID 6. Cheaper would be to setup a box that runs off md raid and I'd just use some cheap 2TB drives, maybe roll 3 of them into a RAID5 or something (4 if you want RAID6, which just allows you to lose one more drive, really). Then share it over Samba if she's a windows user, or NFS or something, and go big. You can even use a current box.
Alternatively if you want to get fancy, setup a new box with OpenFiler and go all Enterprisey or something. My biggest advice on either would be to do this ONCE. Don't engineer it for your current need and have to redo this when you grow out of it. Drives are cheap as hell and there's no excuse for not planning for 5 years from now, when she's backing up small videos and stuff you're not thinking of right now. I may have been bit by this exact thing with my wife before. >.> -Tod Hansmann /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
