NAS server for small design business. Any recommendations?

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Level 1

9 points

NAS server for small design business. Any recommendations?

Hi All.
I run a small design business which consists of me running it and farming out 'overflow' jobs. I'm trying to build the business up to around 10 off-site freelancers and myself.

Obviously, there's a fair amount of file sharing going on. At the moment I have a 2TB Thuderbolt drive which I use consistently. I also have a WD Mycloud 4TB server.

When I have a job for someone to work on I have to take the job from my Thunderbolt drive and then copy them onto a shared folder on the WD Mycloud, then they drag them off and work on them, then drop them back on, then I have to file everything accordingly.
As you can imagine, this is becoming time-consuming and tedious.

Is there some kind of server I can purchase that will work like the WD cloud but better? The WD one is really slow to copy files locally and it kind of makes the performance of my mac a bit jittery whilst I'm copying things. It's also a bit unreliable and 'drops connection' quite a lot.

Can anyone recommend a good solution for this that they've used. I have a maximum budget of around £2500 if needs be. Ideally I'd like around 6-8TB but 4TB will do.

Thanks in advance.

iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013), OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on May 3, 2017 3:44 AM

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Answer 1

JimmyCMPIT

Level 7

29,258 points

May 4, 2017 12:17 PM in response to andyward82

I'm working with someone who is steering me towards Buffalo as they are using it for a number of small offices and are impressed with it's flexibility. I may be implementing this for a very similar project shortly but I need to see what the client wants to do.

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Answer 2

May 4, 2017 12:38 PM in response to andyward82

Really depends on what features you're after, and how much time and money and thought you want to invest in self-hosting and learning about the particular chosen tools... FreeNAS or Synology or ZyXEL or one of the many other NAS implementations that are available. OwnCloud or analogous too, but that can involve installing a different server for a supported configuration, though there are reports OwnCloud can be gotten to work on some versions of macOS. Mayhap OpenStack. Installing Server.app on macOS Server on a Mac mini or other handy Mac can also provide file services and other capabilities. Ordinary macOS can host and serve files via the Sharing preferences, too. Further up in features and capabilities are document-management apps akin to DocMoto, or distributed source control packages, which can provide revision control and change history data, among other details. There's also how open the connections can or should be, as folks looking to access the files remotely may be best secured via a VPN into your local private network, or by hosting your file share or document archive at an external provider and using a VPN to connect into that. You now have some keyword fodder for the search engines, too.

Bare 8 TB disks were under US$300 last I checked, too.

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