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Questions tagged [network-attached-storage]

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, a mechanism for providing file-level access to storage across a network.

NAS systems are generally formed of a RAID array (or multiples thereof) of disks, and a file server providing a number of different protocols, often NFS and CIFS (SMB), and sometimes AFP which provide file-level access to a number of different clients.

NAS devices can be compared to SAN systems, where the NAS provides storage and a filesystem, but the SAN only provides storage, and leaves the filesystem level decisions down to the client.

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What is the difference between SAN, NAS and DAS?

What is the difference between SAN, NAS and DAS?
sevugarajan
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What network file sharing protocol has the best performance and reliability?

We have a setup with a few web servers being load-balanced. We want to have some sort of network shared storage that all of the web servers can access. It will be used as a place to store files uploaded by users. Everything is running Linux. Should…
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Ext4 vs. XFS vs. Btrfs vs. ZFS for NAS

My use case: I have Ubuntu Server 18.04 installed on an M.2 SSD. I have a 4TB HDD I want to add as storage. Since it's mostly for large media files and backups, it won't be written to very often. Which filesystem do you think is best suited for this…
Alex Shaw
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What is a Storage Area Network, and which benefits does it have over different storage solutions?

I'm proposing this to be a canonical question about enterprise-level Storage Area Networks. What is a Storage Area Network (SAN), and how does it work? How is it different from a Network Attached Storage (NAS)? What are the use cases compared to…
Massimo
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NAS Performance: NFS vs Samba vs GlusterFS

I am planning my new shared storage infrastructure for a small webserver farm. Therefore i ran a lot of tests with a lot of NAS filesystems. By doing so, i got some unexpected results and would like to know whether somebody here can confirm this. In…
Linus Ardberk
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ZFS RAID and LUKS encryption in Linux

I'm planning to setup a set of 3x 2TB 7200rpm drives as a LUKS-encrypted Z-RAID pool in Linux (for a NAS solution). My understanding of the problem at hand is that the only way to achieve this is to luksFormat every physical device and then…
MasterM
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Why pick a NAS over a "normal" NFS share?

From an end-user perspective, what is the difference between a NAS device and using NFS exports from a file server? They seem to accomplish the same end result. The difference between a SAN and other file storage is related (in my experience) to how…
warren
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SQL Server Files Local or NAS or SAN?

I have to install a new Server with SQL Server 2008, What do you recommend, One server with Raid 10 or the Files in a NAS? What about iSCSI should I use it? What about SAN? The server has 4Gb of RAM and that database file is about 2GB. To make my…
Jedi Master Spooky
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Networking Units: Not getting expected performance from 100Mb Ethernet

Our company has a brand new NAS, and the idea is that we will be able to use it for fast, shared access to our data on our network. It's a fairly simple 2-disk system, but from what I understand, it should reach speeds of about 40mb/s. We have a…
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How do you backup a storage server?

I'm looking at implementing a very large storage server to be used as live NAS for several other servers (all Linux-based). By very large, I mean between 4TB and 20TB usable space (although it's unlikely we'll actually make it 20TB). The storage…
Andrew Ensley
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VM Inaccessible

So I had to remotely shut down my servers last night as the air conditioner crapped out on us. I shut down the VMs and then the hosts. Fired up the 2 hosts today which auto start the VMs. Datastores for the VMs are isci LUNs located on a Synology…
Reedee
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RAID configuration for large NAS

I'm thinking of building a 24 1TB disk NAS box, but I'm not sure what the best drive configuration is. I'm looking at using the areca ARC-1280ML-2G controller, and hanging all 24 drives off of it. I'd like it all to be mounted as one volume, due to…
kevin42
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Disk Usage Analyzer on Synology

How can I get an overview of the disk usage on a Synology hard drives like this:
kimliv
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Should I build my own or buy a cheap NAS?

I've looked at this question and gotten some ideas from it. Assume I want something that runs quietly with raid support. I see the choices as being buy a home NAS solution most of which appear to be $400 or more, or build my own low powered PC and…
Jared
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Scalable (> 24 TB) NAS for research department

I have been asked to provide a new fileserver to store our medical images (raw format, not dicom). As we have no IT staff, I have to find a solution, and I hardly know anything about this topic. The requirements we have are: scalable to 24 TB in 3…
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