One of our servers is being mostly used just as a data storage and this is running out.

I've looked at something like the Buffalo Terrastation III 2Tb system but wondered if that will be suitable for around 20 people to access every day or is it more designed as archive storage?

Anyone using one?

We've installed some ReadyNAS NV's in to clients sites for archive purposes, they're not bad. I wouldn't use one for a frequently used data store though.

Interesting, any particular reason why not?

Far too slow ever on gigabit network. An 8GB folder could take 12 hours to copy to a temp folder for burning to CD.

That's terrible.

Yeah, he's gonna need some dual layer DVDs, not CDs.

1gb/s = 8 secs for 1GB = 8*8 = 64seconds, or one minute four seconds. Okay, that's an ideal scenario and the HDDs are probably only pumping out 60MB/s or 480Mb/s but that must be a heck of a lot of tiny files for it to take twelve hours to move.

I was thinking about moving our office across to a NAS box for synchronised file storage, but the costs of a four disk solution with RAID 1+0 and dual 1Gb/s network seemed quite high; before you even consider the 1TB SAS drives (enterprise storage so that we get 1.3m hrs MTBF.)

If the networking would be an issue too then that would be pretty bad.

Well we now have a NetGear NAS device - has 3Tb storage space on Raid5 array and we are using that to backup our main servers every night as part of our disaster recovery plan.

First time it took 54hrs to backup 1.2Tb information but it is an incrimental system and last nights backup took just over 4hrs to backup the changes - some 80Gb - and then it also replicates itself onto an external hard drive which is taken off-site.

Been running this system for a week now and very impressed - easy to replace a file/folder if a user deletes it by mistake as its a simple drag n drop affair.

TBH I don't see that kind of consistent throughout off our SAN with 15k FC disks, so I'd be quite surprised if a small SATA unit can sustain that kind of throughput.



Do they make 1TB SAS disks yet?

Well, you'll see much better results with larger files or monolithic compressed files.

And yes, but they're just 7200RPM drives with the SAS technology in them and longer warranties than desktop drives. We have them in RAID arrays in two of our web servers and they reasonably good.

SAS is supposed to be about 30% faster than SATA II

Can't say I've ever seen 1TB SAS drives. I've had midline 1TB sata's in hotswap bays but never a SAS drive bigger than 300GB

We're both wrong I've just spotted that HP do some 7.2k 1TB SAS disks @ £450 a pop.

Shame they're not running at proper speeds though.

Hi john, just wondering what your RTO is if you ever did have to restore from backup in the event of a full failure?

even taking into acount the asynchronisity of the read write process from the NAS, thats going to be significantly longer than 1 business day to restore everything?

That might not be the emphasis of your DR plan but I was just curious?

Well our DR plan involves our offsite IT providers having one of the external drives with our complete system on so they can replicate our systems their end as a virtual server.

Once a month we will swap the hard drive for another and they will update this virtual server so in the event of a total-loss we can just log-in remotely to this virtual server and carry on working whilst they go about replacing the hardware for us.