Recommendations for RAID 5 NAS

Megadeth4168

Hi everyone! I've looked through a few benchmarks and reviews on NAS devices, but I figured I would see what our trusted community of professionals have had good experiences with.

My office has used Netapp filer, it worked great, but the maintenance cost was ridiculous!

We then switched over to Adaptecs Snapservers... They worked OK but we had a lot of issues with the OS on those devices. Share would continually lose permissions or just disappear completely.

Lately we have been using a cheap solution. We have an external SATA RAID (Addonics) which is connected to a 2003 server box we have. Unfortunately, we have had so many issues with the RAID going in to degraded modes. The drives always test fine, but there are so many points of failure that it is hard to tell what is what.

I think I've convinced management to consider spending a bit of extra money toward a new NAS, but I don't know how much that will be, moreover, I don't think they want to pay out for an annual support again.

On a side note... We have 2 Buffalo TerraStation 2 units that are for one application in particular. So, they have much less load and simple permissions set up on them, but so far they have worked perfectly.

So, any recommendations of NAS devices that have worked well for the pros here?

Thanks!

it_consultant

I have used Drobos, for the price they are hard to beat, but they DO have problems with iSCSI.

Whatever you use will be nothing compared to NetApp. They charge ridiculous fees because they have (arguably) the best SANs you can get.

Slowhand

I've really only ever used the Buffalo TeraStation II NAS devices, and they've treated me pretty well. With the exception of the fact that it took quite a while for Buffalo to update the software for Windows Server 2008 AD integration, I've never really had any problems with them.