NAS experts....need advice and opinions

[Digitalcandy]

NAS #1
- Dell PowerVault 770N
- Dual Xeon 2.4GHz / 533MHz bus
- 6 SCSI HDs 136GBs 10K RPM
- Hardware RAID 5
- 2GB Memory
- 3 Year, Next day warranty
- Retail ~$12,500

NAS #2
- Dell PowerVault 725N
- Pentium 4 2.8GHz / 800MHz bus
- 4 IDE Hard drives 250GBs 7200RPM
- Hardware RAID 5
- 1GB memory
- 3 Year, Next day warranty
- Retail ~$5600


Things the NAS will be used for;
It will be the central location for all data files
- User home folders
- large CAD files
- Hopefully a print server, (Win2003 NAS OS comes with this option)
- Software, Updates, Patches, Drivers

At any given time I'd estimate 10-15 people will be accessing files on it so it could potentially see heavy use.

Is #1's price justified over #2? I'm mainly concerned with speed because it's hard to push reliability concerns on a boss that is not computer savy. Can I confidently tell my boss that #1 is twice as fast as #2? I know he will never know, and problaby me neither since I can't compare, but I don't like to falsify my requests.

 

[FredUG]

No, NAS1 is NOT 2x faster than NAS2 it just has 2x the number of CPU's and RAM. It also uses better SCSI drives that cost more but perform better. The drive speed is important with NAS but NAS doesn't really benefit much from SMP (multi-CPU's) and basically it looks like it's just a simple file/print server. You can always add more RAM to either, if needed.

10-15 users is not "heavy use" With your usage, I'd say go with NAS2. You could get 2 for less than the price of the other. I'd also recommend (assuming they don't come with) Gbit networking so everyone can pull those large CAD files down at full speeds.

Hope that helps,

FredUG

 

[Rols]

I would agree with Fred. We distribute a number of different NAS boxes suited for similar small environments (10-50 users) & the specs of most of them are less than a 1gig CPU with 512Mb RAM. These specs perform fine up to about 100 users. So I would say that the NAS 2 would be a viable option.

If you look around more Im sure you could even find a pure NAS box cheaper - But be warned - I have not had great experiences with pure NAS devices (with the expceptions of NettApps).

Cheers