I work in a small web development shop/branding agency and we are looking at potentially upgrading our NAS server. Currently we are running a LaCie 8big Raid server, set for RAID 5. Would it be better to stick with this, or potentially build a FreeNas box for more expandability? This will be for a mixed PC and Mac office. Any general advice would be appreciated.
FreeNAS will rock your socks off, but you can't add drives and stuff as willy-nilly as you can with LaCie and Drobo.
If you did a 10 mechanical drive setup with two SSDs for caching, you could easily saturate a 10 gigabit interface. 32tb of storage and 1+ gigabyte/sec is not bad. 16+gb ECC and Xeon 1230v3+ would be a good platform. There are some good ready-made commercial brands as well.
Currently we are running the LaCie off of a mac Mini, via thunderbolt. I think our main issue is saturating the gigabit port on the Mini, so I may try adding usb or thunderbolt to ethernet adapters to start off with, but I'm not sure if the Mini could take advantage of link aggregation.
The NAS server you describe here makes me feel.... inadequate ;)
Of course, in a couple of years we'll be scoffing at the thought of ye olde flywheel data-storage system, so I wonder if it's worth spending big on mechanical drives at the moment, or going with just enough and expanding as needed? (Maybe that's a hassle vs cost issue).
I just set up my rockstor NAS its nice but i wouldn't use something that new in a business. But I believe that you can add add more drives whenever you want. Hopefully it eventual surpasses freenas in features.
Thanks for the advice guys! I'm sure I will be asking many more questions when we transition into our new office in a couple weeks. As the only person in office with any real IT background, quite a bit of this will end up on my shoulders
You could try creating a test freenas box in virtualbox or on a old system to see how it works out. If you don't like it go with whatever prebuilt you feel more comfortable with.