Home NAS / Storage

datacomboss

I just built a small FC fabric with used equipment (from ebay and recycled customer equipment) including 4 x Dell 2950's (RAID-1 - 2 x 146 GB 15K SATA HDD), Qlogic 8GB FC switch/HBAs and EMC CX4 array (15 x 450GB 15K FC HDD RAID-5 and RAID-10). Local replication to another Dell 2950 with 6 x 750 GB 7200 SATA HDD. Remote replication to AWS S3 and Google Drive using Syncovery (formerly known as Super Flexible File Synchronizer). Looking to add a used NetApp NAS head soon.

down77

I decided on the Synology since I can use it for a number of purposes. My plan was to purchase a Citrix/Microsoft/Riverbed (Granite)/VMware supported device that I can also use for backing up my wife's MBP/Adobe Lightroom Images/Music/Movies/VMs/Work Demos/etc. Since I've worked with Drobo, IOMega, QNap, Synology, and others in the past I chose the device that I felt would provide the best cost vs performance break point.

In full disclosure I was able to get a Synology unit for a decent discount. Amazon listed $779, ebay had a New In Box for $680, but since I work for a VAR my cost was ~$400. I also reached out to a vendor that I have a great relationship with and purchased a few refurb WD30EFRX drives (1yr warranty) for $50ea bringing my total cost up to $650 plus shipping for the solution. My cost per Dell C1100 server (dual Quad core 2.26 with 72Gb Ram, single 500Gb drive) on ebay was $529 with shipping. I am currently using the C1100 servers, as well as a bunch of other gear, as part of my home lab.

Could I have went with a FreeNas/Openfiler/cheaper solution? Yes, but like I stated above the cost would have ended up around the same by the time I got around to putting in everything I needed to make the solution work.

Firing up the device and getting it to work was pretty easy. All I had to do was connect it to my network and browse to https://diskstation:5000. I had most things up and working in a matter of moments. The DSM 5.0 software is relatively easy to use and I should have most of my VMs and new VDI lab built out on it by the end of the weekend.

down77

datacomboss wrote: »

I just built a small FC fabric with used equipment (from ebay and recycled customer equipment) including 4 x Dell 2950's (RAID-1 - 2 x 146 GB 15K SATA HDD), Qlogic 8GB FC switch/HBAs and EMC CX4 array (15 x 450GB 15K FC HDD RAID-5 and RAID-10). Local replication to another Dell 2950 with 6 x 750 GB 7200 SATA HDD. Remote replication to AWS S3 and Google Drive using Syncovery (formerly known as Super Flexible File Synchronizer). Looking to add a used NetApp NAS head soon.

I was looking for a cheap SAN array as a potential solution since I have some MDS 9148 and MDS9216i at the house, but couldnt find one with a decent price. I'm hoping to pick up a FAS3140 relatively cheap from an account that was going to throw it away after they purchased their VNX2 5400

jibbajabba

That'd be a heck of a home nas ... I hope for you it is being thrown away with the licenses

down77

If I get it is more like it. They may look in to selling it to one of the refurb vendors and use the money for other things.

tpatt100

I use an AMD system I put together with a budget dual core AMD CPU. I put Windows 8 on it using my WGU license from Dreamspark and hooked up a 4 TB external drive that is running Windows File History which works great. I have actually used File History to restore mistakes I made on the box when I would delete something by accident. The box has all my movie, home movies, TV shows and music I rip and stream to the two Apple TVs and Amazon Fire TV(XBMC) in the house.

I still store stuff in the cloud using OneDrive and Dropbox but it's primarily photos from my wife's and my own phones, I setup the sync to the computer so there is a local and cloud backup. I really don't need the resilience of a NAS I just make sure I have a backup system in place to restore if a drive fails. I just didn't see much benefit gained for the increased cost of extra drives and I wanted to use most of what I already owned. I will eventually invest in a new set of drives once I get enough together to buy several of the same model and size to make a NAS worth it.

Deathmage

I'm personally considering buying this bad boy for the home lab so I can have a home-based SAN for the esxi-cluster so the LUN's can be one spot. Plus I would think I could also use it as a NAS to share our files over the internet to stream video's to my mobile phone from anywhere. Could setup one connection to the iSCSI switch for the esxi cluster and the other connection to the core network for file shares.

It looks like it's realtively low in power consumption too.

http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?sn=822&c=351&sc=513&t=520&n=18168

paul78

PurpleIT wrote: »

FreeNAS...

I'm a big fan of FreeNAS. Does everything that I need and more. New version even has a Plex plugin which I am in the middle of playing with. I have 2 FreeNAS servers which I run on old 900Mhz Celeron systems with a whopping 254Mb of RAM. I am building 2 new FreeNAS servers which I will run as VM's on 2 different ESX hosts. I plan to use the older Celeron servers for backups and storing ISO's, etc.

Deathmage

Just ordered the : Amazon.com: QNAP TS-420 4-bay Personal Cloud NAS, DLNA, Mobile App, iSCSI Supported: Computers & Accessories

It should suffice to my needs a a iSCSI-based NAS for the ESXi cluster. - it also seems feature rich such as streaming to my phone and other nifty things. Plus Amazon Prime has this sucker really cheap tonight only!!!

Trashman

Got the Synology RS812 and it's working very well.

As for backup I use Symform which is a solution where you can install the Symform app on your Synology and you get 1 GB for every 2 GB you contribute.