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Small Office Nas And Backup Advice

QWK32

By QWK32,
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QWK32 Veteran

QWK32

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Hi guys, I've been asked to help setup a small office network and while i am competent enough to setup the network i just need a little advice on how to go about the NAS and backup side of things. Now when i say small office i mean small, the basic run down of the setup will be:

  • the internet modem / wifi router
  • 2 Notebooks
  • 1 or 2 networked printers
  • NAS

Now my questions are, with most NAS's these days i see that they can be fairly easily setup as RAID with most having some sort of on board software to select the RAID format you want. My knowledge of RAID is limited at the moment (still learning) but from what I've read RAID 5 looks like a good setup to help in the prevention of data loss when a drive fails, but also still maintaining a good amount of overall storage space when compared to say RAID 1.

Is it possible to setup a 4-Bay Hotswappable NAS with 3 of the drives in a RAID 5 array and the 4th drive as a separate backup drive that can be removed at the end of each day (this drive will be taken offsite each night)? So i was looking at say 3 x 1TB HDD in RAID 5 giving 2TB total storage, and a separate 2TB HDD for backup.

The second option i was looking into, which is probably easier from my perspective to setup, was a 4-Bay NAS setup as RAID 5, and use an external HDD as a backup drive.

Any opinions/advice on the above would be appreciated, is there a better way i could set it up? is RAID 5 the right choice? thanks.

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CLNSKY Experienced

CLNSKY

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I have a very similar setup using a HP Proliant micro server. http://tinyurl.com/c3g5prl

I installed Freenas on it and run ZFS (Similar to Raid 5)

It has never gone down or died on me in ~ 2 years and was pretty easy to setup.

Heres a link with loads of into that I learnt a lot from. http://tinyurl.com/6d3lz57

Other options would be to buy a preconfigured nas box from Dlink, Qnap, Synology etc, but they are more expensive but easier to setup.

QWK32 Veteran

QWK32

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thanks for that, i'll have a read through it tonight. I was looking at the Netgear and Qnap boxes, and then buying my own drives to go in them, it worked out alot cheaper than buying a NAS with drives included. Prices were around the $600-$800 mark depending on what capacity drives we went with. we're not after massive amount of storage, so anything around 2-4TB is going to be fine.

Just thinking about the setup, is it possible to setup a RAID ontop of another RAID. So RAID5 3 drives together to give lets say 2TB, then RAID1 (mirror) those to another 2TB drive? will i upset the RAID system by removing a drive every night?

R31Nismoid Grand Master

R31Nismoid

Posted
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Just remember with RAID5 - you need a 3 bay NAS as a minimum.

One drive bay is then made redundant - so you effectively "loose" it to act as a backup drive.

So if you have say a 3 bay NAS and put 3x 3TB drives in - you only get 6TB. The 3rd drive (3TB) is then redundancy in case the other 2 drives in the array die.

This is why those QNAP and similar NAS drives IMO are absurdly priced for what they are.

I built my own server with a spare PC case & a old mobo/CPU.

I simply purchased a Perc 5/i RAID CARD and I just use Windows Home Server. So with the Perc 5/i I have 8 slots so i can run 7 drives in RAID5 for up to 21TB when using 3TB drives - to get a 8 bay NAS you'd be looking at over $2000.

So yeah my server isn't the "smallest" as its the same size as a mid-tower PC case, but room isn't a problem for me where shelling out 2k+ is :)

Also the 5/i needs a fan on it constantly so it's a bit noisy but again, not a concern i have. A 6/i card i believe is better in that department but the cost twice as much. Still cheap if you need loads of storage however.

QWK32 Veteran

QWK32

Posted
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Thanks nismoid, yes I realise with RAID5 you loose one drive worth of capacity. Its not really a big issue as I said earlier we don't need a lot of storage space and anything around 2-4TB will be more than enough.

Setting up a small server isn't really on the cards,the guys don't really want the extra hassel of a dedicated PC storage server and really like the idea of these easy "plug any play" NAS's on the market. Basically need to keep the setup as simple as possible.

The only thing I'm stuck on at the moment is the backup solution, it would be great to have the backup drive apart of the NAS box and just remove it at the end of the day.

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