NAS for Small Business - Rack Mount

Hey,

I work at a Church and we need to implement a backup system. I am looking at a Rack-Mount NAS system, which allows us to back up individual computers (specific folders - not whole OS) to it, but to also provide us with multiple Shared Drives with different permissions.

There are only about 5 people that will be using it for backup. We will be running the disks in a mirroring configuration, and would like the shared drives accessible by both Windows and Mac computers.
If it can store multiple versions of files, then that is also a bonus.

Now there were a couple of options I was looking at, but would love your advice as to what you would recommend.
1) Synology RackStation RS820+ - would upgrade the RAM from the base 2GB to add an additional 4GB.
2) Netgear ReadyNAS RR2304 (or something like it).

I have spoken to the Synology chat support, and they have said that it will do everything we are needing. But I haven't spoken to anyone about the Netgear one. I know there are also other good brands out there, so I am open to other suggestions.

The Synology one would probably push the budget too much, but if it is definitely the better one then I could make a good case for it.

Anyway, your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

A video that might interest you:

 

Please, no Linus. Please. Take a peek at the videos where he tries in vain to work out why his production SAN that he expertly built shits the bed.

That said, Synology you pay for the convenience. Keep in mind that you should also backup your backup ie don't rely on the NAS as your sole backup. Consider keeping a second copy in Google Drive/Onedrive/other cloud service; the monthly rates for a few TB are pretty cheap.

 

Ironically that's a sponsored video by Synology that shows how to set one up and some new drives.

TBH Synology is the most widely used ready box NAS out there for a reason. It's really good.

 

TrueNAS/FreeNAS depending on your technical expertise, they sell off the shelf rack solutions ready to go just add drives or you can roll your own (based on their recommended hardware lists). I've run their software for years and it's amazing.

 

I agree as I think I saw the video you mentioned where his 100 TB or thereabouts of storage in his main server was composed of several Raid 5 stripes and of course one drive failed somewhere plus it all went offline for some other reason, and once they "replaced" the failed drive and turned it back on they discovered a couple of the drives in a hardware raid 5 stripe were swapped around in position and everything was understandably "corrupted" on that stripe.

After they were put back into their proper sequence the operation of the system was deemed "successful" because as far as he was concerned most of the videos he had stored were "playable" but who knows what was left corrupted in that whole shebang given that there were also bound to be a couple of bad blocks here and there plus it was all NTFS and not something like ZFS with each block being checksummed. Watching that video was like having root canal therapy at the dentist the whole time where the anesthetic was only 80% effective.

 

I'd say either a synology rackmount or a Qnap - we use Qnap boxes for our site data storage and I've been super impressed with them so far, specs and performance are quite good for what we paid for them, we've got TS463XU boxes here