JamesSneed :
daglesj :
derekullo :
Nothing beats the feeling of building your own san/nas the way you want it with FreeNas or Nas4Free
ZFS for life!!!
Thats fine for hobbyists or home users but sometimes you need something a little less homebrew. Especially in a work/small business environment. If a customer asks me to setup a file sharing and backup system then a off the shelf NAS from QNAP/Synology etc. is very very hard to beat. Setup and installed in 15 minutes and away I go. Time is money.
Also you choose a NAS because a lot of companies don't have full time IT depts or want to pay for over priced support contracts. The number of firms I've found with $10000 servers and $1000 a month support contracts when all they need is a $500 NAS is very high.
Those same companies overspending usually don't have competent IT folks and the most important thing for disk systems like a NAS is backups and recovery outside of the obvious performance and storage capacity. For a small company a proper off site backup that gets tested at least once a year to validate recovery is where I would put my extra money.
A fractal design define r5 has enough space for 8 hard drives.
Coupled with even a Core i3-6300T (supports ECC and lower power) and 32 gigabytes of ram it would run circl.... decahedrons around:
CPU
Marvell Quad-Core SoC (1.2 GHz Peak)
DRAM
2GB DDR3
"The system uses the same Marvell quad-core CPU and 2GB DRAM combination to power through complex workloads"
I almost though thought they were being sarcastic
For cheaper than the $884 they want for this drobo.
And it would allow you to run deduplication if you ever had the need.
You can say well not everyone needs that kind of power for their NAS.
And that may be true.
But if you are shopping for an 8 drive NAS/SAN then you are probably looking for something decently powerful.
I would imagine most small business would be fine with a 2, 3 or 4 bay NAS.
A 4 bay NAS for $230 is hard to beat even with a custom system and for a customer that is satisfied with that kind of speed and capacity it works well
But when you jump up to an 8 bay NAS and they want $884 without drives then I would start looking at a custom built NAS.