NAS raid6 solution for small company

minikin

Hi folks,

Mac based
Some very large files
Currently running three macs with individual external drives and cloud for backup (gigabit networking / Eir fibre)

Can you recommend a more professional / secure system?
(Small business, not a massive budget unfortunately, main thing is that the storage should be accessible seamlessly on each machine - like a drive appearing on desktop)
Is it possible to quickly add the data from each mac? (About 20TB, so using thunderbolt connection preferably)

Thanks in advance

ED E

With an SME and little management going to happen you want something thats fire and forget and will alert the staff quickly if something goes into the red. Basically Synology or QNAP are the leaders there. They have their faults, but in cases like yours they're ideal.


If they're running Macs they're 1G NICS (except the 2018 iMac Pro) so the 10G upgrade option isn't relevant.


An 8 Bay unit of 4TB disks in RAID6 gives you a 24TB pool. Use bigger disks if necessary. To fill it:

Speed: 120 MB/s
Size: 20 TB
48 Hours, 32 Minutes and 42 Seconds

Transferring over TB would help, but remember write speeds will peak somewhere around 180MB/s so itll never be super fast. Set it going on a Friday afternoon and walk away, come back Monday to a filled array.

minikin

Thanks Ed E,

Appreciate the response, thinking about the following populated with 8tb Toshiba n300 drives.
QNAP TVS-873-16G NAS

It’s only a six bay, rather than eight - is that a problem?

Feck, thought there’d be a quicker way of creating the data set

ED E

Slightly lower read speeds, writes are the same either way. I'd check if Backblaze tested those drives to be sure.


As its a 10Gb NIC you can add a switch with a 10Gb uplink port. Then each Mac has 1Gb I/O each, instead of 1Gb shared.

minikin

Thanks again Ed E,

Had a look at the backblaze stats, two toshiba drive models sampled (very low quantities over shorter period of time but 0% failure rate, could be great drives or may be statistically misleading)

We’ve always used hgst and previously hitachi in workstations, no failures yet touch wood, preference would be for hgst ultra star he10 drives but they’re twice the price of the n300.

Plan is to replace three current work stations in the next twelve months (why I want to streamline data first) so 10gb networking is next project. Can’t find thunderbolt/10gbe adaptors at the moment unfortunately!