Posted: 9/8/2025 12:31:12 PM EDT
[Last Edit: drfroglegs][Edited]
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I'm relatively tech savy. Installed a 10AP unifi system at my church and it's been running great for the past 5 or 6 years. I've done some networking in the past so felt pretty confident. Now we're interested in having some type of network storage. Ideally it would be something that would show up on networked computers where people could save files and the system would have some type of RAID for redundancy. This is a little outside my expertise so I'm not even sure what I should be researching. We have 2 bays left in the cabinet so ideally it would be 1-2U rack mountable. So what would you guys recommend?. Some type of NAS? Setup a server of some sort? Thanks for the help System I installed. Pretty proud of it if I'm being honest. I'm a scientist, so this is way outside my educational experience. Attached File |
We're living in an episode of Who's Line is it Anyway.
Where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
Where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
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If your not someone that wants to deal with supporting the device and its Hard Drives, you might consider Drop box. Both the Small company I work for and my Wife Company have used Drop box for a decade or so and never had an issue.... They maintain the servers, drives and everything, You just log in create sub folders like Main>Financials Main>Schedules Main>Roster Main>Project 1 Main>Project 2 Main>Etc>Etc>Etc Put the drop box client on each PC, MAC, Tablet or Phone that needs it and your good to go. My wife is a manager over 3 Car lots, her and her boss and their finance guy have access to all files, for all three locations, the folks that work at Lot 1 only have access to file Folder/Files for Lot 1, same for Folks from Lots 2 or 3... This lets you assign who sees or can access what... Just a thought/ Option. You pay one fee, yearly fee, you never worry about a drive failing, lighting killing a server or NAS, room in the rack, etc..... |
LARUEMINATI
NRA Endowment Life Member
Originally Posted By Boom_Stick:
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NRA Endowment Life Member
Originally Posted By Boom_Stick:
""AKs are for villagers you have to tell not to shit in their water supply.""
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What kind of budget & how much storage? You will probably pay a premium for rack mount vs. desktop NAS units. Be sure to look at drive & memory compatibility requirements for the systems you consider. Some brands want to lock you into their eco-system. Regarding storage redundancy, you will have at least one drive dedicated to parity or redundancy to enable 1 drive fault tolerance. A two drive system will consume half the total disk space for redundancy. Systems with a 3+ drive count will generally reduce that percentage. |
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How much space? What is the load going to be? And RAID is not a backup. If it has to be rack mounted your options are going to cost more. If it’s not a huge amount of data, I’d just get a retail NAS like a Synology throw some drives in it, set up your shares and be done. Best bet would be to set up 2 so they can replicate. I use a Asustor 2 bay nas as my primary storage. It has 2x 3.5 bays, and an nvme bay for a cache drive. Then I have my windows server that runs Manage Engine doing backup duty. Cost efficient way of doing it. If you have a good budget, the sky is the limit. |
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Originally Posted By smullen: If your not someone that wants to deal with supporting the device and its Hard Drives, you might consider Drop box. Both the Small company I work for and my Wife Company have used Drop box for a decade or so and never had an issue.... They maintain the servers, drives and everything, You just log in create sub folders like Main>Financials Main>Schedules Main>Roster Main>Project 1 Main>Project 2 Main>Etc>Etc>Etc Put the drop box client on each PC, MAC, Tablet or Phone that needs it and your good to go. My wife is a manager over 3 Car lots, her and her boss and their finance guy have access to all files, for all three locations, the folks that work at Lot 1 only have access to file Folder/Files for Lot 1, same for Folks from Lots 2 or 3... This lets you assign who sees or can access what... Just a thought/ Option. You pay one fee, yearly fee, you never worry about a drive failing, lighting killing a server or NAS, room in the rack, etc..... Embarrassingly enough, I never even considered Dropbox. That is actually an excellent idea. I think I'll go that route. Could use the standard media email address to create the account and give select people access. It will only be holding documents, pictures, etc., so would not need a ton of space. Thanks everyone |
We're living in an episode of Who's Line is it Anyway.
Where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
Where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
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Unifi has a NAS: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/accessories-cables-dacs/products/unas-pro |
If it's horrible, it exists. If it's beautiful, you're imagining it.
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Originally Posted By GTwannabe: Unifi has a NAS: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/accessories-cables-dacs/products/unas-pro |
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If it were me in this situation I would get people on M365 with a domain for the church. There is pricing for non-profit type orgs. Synology is not just a NAS you throw a bunch of files into and be done with it. You can setup PC backups so if someone at the church has a PC failure and you need to recreate their computer on a new unit it's easy to do. You can backup M365 to it so if someone accidentally deletes all of their emails you can easily get the stuff back. You can eventually buy a 2nd one to sync between the two and have it offsite so if something happens to the church like a fire you have everything safe in another location. Think of it like a small business office. Even a small 4 bay unit would give you the full Synology software stack and you'd have drive redundancy. I am a Unifi fan but their NAS product is very immature compared to Synology. Just be aware that Synology is tightening down on what drives they will support so you can't just go to Best Buy and buy whatever is cheapest and throw it in there anymore. Whatever you do please ensure you buy the appropriate product which in your case is going to be a business level license. I've had to explain to many people that running a business (or non-profit) with a personal gmail.com or outlook.com email address is against their TOS and they do crack down on those accounts periodically. People have had outlook.com (MS) accounts vanished with no recourse for running a business with it. People run into a lot of trouble with gmail accounts if they try to do something like send mailing lists out. If you look at the DropBox pricing page at the top of the Plus tier it says 'For personal use'. |
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