Recommend A Small Office NAS

Bluefrog

As it says in the title, I'm looking for recommendations on a good NAS unit for small office use. Requirements Follow:

Should serve 5 - 10 seats comfortably.
Minimum Storage of 500 GB
Should be accessible over the Internet

Would also be interested in hearing what I should be looking for in a NAS.

Thanks in advance for the help.

BigEejit

Bluefrog wrote: »

As it says in the title, I'm looking for recommendations on a good NAS unit for small office use. Requirements Follow:

Should serve 5 - 10 seats comfortably.
Minimum Storage of 500 GB
Should be accessible over the Internet

Would also be interested in hearing what I should be looking for in a NAS.

Thanks in advance for the help.

A lot of the Qnap NAS boxes are good value for money

For instance a 4 bay one with the possibility to back up to a remote box:
http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_hardware.asp?p_id=85

There are also 2 bay boxes ... it all depends on the features you want.

DublinWriter

Buffalo NAS units FTW.

Capt'n Midnight

moving as this isn't a windows question

access from the internet is easy
stopping everyone else on the internet connecting is the hard bit and I suspect that you would need to setup a VPN on your firewall
if you are looking for a NAS with a build in VPN you might look at getting a low end pc with a 500GB drive in it so you have more control over the VPN

Khannie

Normal linux box with a few cheap disks in (linux kernel software) raid 5? This would provide the performance you require and be cheap too. edit: You could start out with 2 disks in raid 1 if cash is an issue, then move to raid 5 later when you need to expand.

Bluefrog

Yeah, wasn't sure where to really post this so thanks for moving.

Considered the Linux box idea myself but I'm no Linux sys admin. While I would like to improve my skills in that area I'm not sure doing it at the expense of the organisation I'm doing this for would be the best idea - will store that one for a home project.

The QNap seems to do what I require quite nicely with minimal setup (it is essentially a dedicated Linux box) at a decent price and with Python on board it should be very extensible functionality-wise so its leading now.

Khannie

Fair enough. Sounds reasonable anyway.

For what it's worth:

1) Setting up raid on linux is very straightforward.
2) Learning on the job is good for you and your employer (I became a linux geek on the job, then installed it at home)

ethernet

Bluefrog wrote: »

... Considered the Linux box idea myself but I'm no Linux sys admin. While I would like to improve my skills in that area I'm not sure doing it at the expense of the organisation I'm doing this for would be the best idea - will store that one for a home project ...

FreeNAS (www.freenas.org) is a very approachable and easy-to-use OS to turn any computer with some life in it into a NAS device. Worth a look at least.

Bluefrog

thanks Ethernet, when an old box comes my way again I'll definitely try this out.