Office NAS

[Linkedblade]

The office I work for has a an old Xeon tower that they plan on replacing. My budget is about 1k USD.

I was going to with a ryzen r5 2600, 16gb ram, a gt 1030 for a sole video out, and two 1TB Samsung 860 qvo's in raid 1.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/4kckWb

That's the rough idea. Only thing I'm hesitant about is a 10gig network card. Thoughts and comments are appreciated.

[Kagthul]

just get a real NAS, imo.

higher end ones even have video out

[chazus]

Second getting a proper NAS. A synology with proper mirroring is within your budget.

[Linkedblade]

Second getting a proper NAS. A synology with proper mirroring is within your budget.

The business has a cloud redundancy contract. I was just trying to get them an alternative to what they were being sold which was a refurbed Dell optiplex with a 4th gen i5 for $990.

Not sure if they absolutely need windows, but like I said they have a Xeon tower.

[chazus]

At this point, from a professionals standpoint, I'd want to do and audit, because if they have cloud backup... I'd want to find out what the office's actual usage and needs are to get a proper solution.

Otherwise I'd say why spend so much. Get a $400 i3 or Ryzen and a fast nvme drive and call it a day.

[lockblock]

I'm going to have to agree with the others unless you plan to load it up with other tasks such as VMs, native windows software, or want an excessive amount of drives.

In that event, you're likely good on CPU and memory but very lacking on drive bays, SATA ports, and even PCIe slots since the primary one is wasted on the GPU.

[Linkedblade]

At this point, from a professionals standpoint, I'd want to do and audit, because if they have cloud backup... I'd want to find out what the office's actual usage and needs are to get a proper solution.

Otherwise I'd say why spend so much. Get a $400 i3 or Ryzen and a fast nvme drive and call it a day.

As far as I can tell all they use is quickbooks, an email service for their website, and art in .ai and .pxf along with .xls and .pdf. that's why the seemingly minimal amount of space.. They have about two decades worth of art and work orders on about 500 GB.

So you think something like a 2200G would be enough?

[Kagthul]

As far as I can tell all they use is quickbooks, an email service for their website, and art in .ai and .pxf along with .xls and .pdf. that's why the seemingly minimal amount of space.. They have about two decades worth of art and work orders on about 500 GB.

So you think something like a 2200G would be enough?

Crushingly so.

You could literally get an external HDD and plug it into their router and meet those needs.

A 2200G will be plenty for years to come, but i'd still say...

Get a real NAS.

Its easier for end-users to use in a lot of cases, has a lot more tools built in that you'd have to manually add and manage with Windows, etc.

You can get a good QNAP or Synology 4-bay NAS for ~300 that will more than do everything you need. May not have native video out, but you could literally get a 50$ used laptop and set it next to the thing to use when someone wants to use its OS and cant be arsed to do it from their own computer.

I have a QNAP 4-bay that i picked up on sale years ago that is super easy to use, easy to clean and work on, and easy to add drives to. Even being years old it supports duplex Ethernet (2x 1Gb connections for 2Gb/sec), has 3 USB ports so you can add even more drives to it if you want (or thumb drives to manually add files) and through OS updates (which it can apply automatically) now supports 16TB drives (so i could theoretically get 84 TB of storage).

Yeah, it wouldn't be a LOT more to simply get a 2200/3200G, a cheap but servicable motherboard, case, etc... but its also not really going to be any more capable without a lot of work and manual maintenance, whereas the NAS will just.. work. I dont know about Synology's software, but QNAP's softare for Mac, PC, and ChromeOS is stupid simple and will auto-mount NAS drives (or just individual folders/volumes based on permissions) at boot, can schedule backups of a given PC to the NAS, all sorts of stuff.

I dont see the benefit of going with a computer-as-NAS for your situation.

Quite honestly, either of these would be overkill for your needs:

https://www.newegg.com/qnap-ts-251-2...quicklink=true

only 2 bay, but your described use doesn't seem to need more (and you can always add additional 4-12 bay enclosures via USB 3), fast quad-core Intel CPU, integrated GPU.

https://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TS-431P-...062827795&th=1

Cheaper, 3 bays. "Slower" ARM CPU (not that anything you're going to be doing is -remotely- CPU intensive).

Just grab an SSD for 1 bay (so its as fast as the network will allow, most likely), and then an HDD, and set it to back up the SSD to the HDD every night (instead of setting them up in mirrored raid which would slow things down).

[Temp name]

This is a business, so reliability is key, correct? Get a pre-built, dedicated NAS.

Both the solution you thought up and the tower-setup they were offered seem overly expensive.