Office NAS drive system

Soldato
Joined
11 May 2007
Posts
8,906
Location
Surrey
8 bay would be overkill for what we need. We are currently using 1TB.

I would likely get a Synology 220j with 2 x 6TB drives.

I could set them replicating and then have 6TB usable. (Raid 5?)

I took a backup of the my cloud drive today with my Passport HD although the passport is still down the corridor from the main office.

I really regret getting a 2 bay FWIW. A 4 bay with three drives should be what I did from the start.
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Jul 2005
Posts
19,205
Location
Norfolk, South Scotland
I really regret getting a 2 bay FWIW. A 4 bay with three drives should be what I did from the start.

The problem with the 4-bay is it’s not enough drives to get decent size and redundancy, plus the read speed is slower. And that’s before you factor in all the other things you tend to get with the bigger enclosures. SSD caching, multiple network ports - even 10GbE ports.

QNAP TS-832X is pretty reasonably priced and the less oomphy processor wouldn’t be an issue in this application.
 
Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
26,053
Absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with using on-site storage as long as you follow the usual rules, ie - backups.

There's nothing wrong with on-site storage, but IMO you need a decent reason to start storing things locally as a new business. Upgrading from Google Workspace Starter to Standard is an extra £4 per month per user, so the cost calculations need to be a comparison of a few years of one vs. the purchase of a NAS, and then comparing the features. If you're sharing video with external parties then they may not want to download from your NAS at 30Mbps.
 
Soldato
Joined
3 Jun 2005
Posts
3,047
Location
The South
There's nothing wrong with on-site storage, but IMO you need a decent reason to start storing things locally as a new business.

Lack of upload speed, 38Mbps in this case, and the fact they're a media agency (likely to be dealing in large files) would be a good reason not to opt for cloud storage.
And cost-per-user isn't the problem; as you said previously, to make the best use of cloud storage you need upload speeds and if you're having to factor in a synchronous connection, then costs spiral for a small business.

And if upload saturation is an issue, @BIGWEB mentions they're using Gsuite so they could easily push (client specific data) to GDrive and keep day-to-day working data local - best of both worlds.

As always, best solution for the budget and only Bigweb knows that so....

@BIGWEB, I'd strongly recommend against "beige" boxing a solution as some are suggesting; go for off-the-shelf with a warranty and support like a Nas device.
And always remember the rule-of-three for backups; simply replicating to your home isn't enough and you really want to be periodically backing up to another storage device (external drive etc) or cloud (BackBlaze, Amazon Glacier, GDrive/OneDrive etc).
 
Last edited:
Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
26,053
Lack of upload speed, 38Mbps in this case, and the fact they're a media agency (likely to be dealing in large files) would be a good reason not to opt for cloud storage.

Not necessarily, it depends on what their work looks like. My point is that if you're a media agency that collaborates with external parties on video content then at some point you need to get those files out of your office, so putting your file storage locally only helps you when staff are in the office working on local files. People working from home and clients trying to review deliverables then all become limited by your broadband-level upload speed, and you're excluded from using services like Frame.io, from offering web streaming services to clients etc.

I've seen this happen countless times where companies will try and work around the fact they have slow Internet because good broadband connection options aren't available to them, and they want to avoid the expense of a leased line (though they are a ton cheaper now than five years ago), so they deploy local resources as much as possible, but they can't fundamentally change the fact that they have an internet connection that doesn't meet the requirements of the business. Everybody I've seen get into this position has realised with a matter of months and after taking on a couple of new staff and ordered a leased line, and then moved out to the cloud when their hardware needs refreshing.

It's not a diktat, obviously the OP can weigh up the options and go with whatever they feel is the best choice, but if you have slow internet then you have slow internet, and opting to store your files locally only fixes one problem.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
7 Oct 2003
Posts
2,447
Location
Liverpool
We currently don't send a huge amount of video out. We are more web design and paid search\Ads.

Most of the video we have done for clients is done offsite by our video guys and uploaded to Vimeo.

Day to day our internet connection is great. We have moved from a smaller office last month where we had normal fibre 80\20 so this 600\40 feels crazy fast.

I'm pretty techie so even though I run the company most of the network\server stuff lives with me which is a really poor use of my time if I'm honest.

Over the last month, I have moved our webserver from one managed by myself on GCP to a managed service which seems to have been the right decision a sit frees me up and means I'm not fighting fires when something goes wrong.

I've collated this info from here into an email and then fired it over to a guy I know who runs a network/IT company with my thoughts and budget so just waiting on him to come back to me.

Thanks for the info. Much appreciated.

I backed up our NAS to a External drive this morning so I will sleep easier for the time being.....
 
Man of Honour
Joined
29 Jun 2003
Posts
34,513
Location
Wiltshire
Completely agree with Caged. I would definitely be looking at moving this all to cloud especially as the users (staff and customers) are all accessing this externally to your office.
 
Caporegime
Joined
8 Mar 2007
Posts
37,146
Location
Surrey
OneDrive. Literally designed for this. Any business managing run of the mill file storage or email locally these days is wasting their IT departments time and money.

Office 365, Google Workspace, whatever. This should be in the cloud in 2021.
 
Permabanned
Joined
22 Oct 2018
Posts
2,451
Thing is that moving to a NAS doesn't really solve the problem that you don't have a backup. I would be more tempted to buy a small two bay Synology to use as a backup with just one drive in there and take your time to look at it and see what a modern NAS can do. Thing is with a NAS they make excellent backup devices. Then you can always move your live data to the NAS later on and sort out another for a backup once you know what they can do.
 
Back
Top Bottom