Which model to buy

[linkoitweb]

Hello, my name is Nicole, I am an IT consultant and am purchasing a new NAS for a client - they currently have a Buffalo NAS Terastation and continually are having issues. They are a small shop but share very large CAD files between 2 Macs and 1 PC -- will be adding an additional Mac as well.

I am looking at the Asustor 6202T -- any insight into this box - is 4GB of memory enough or should we upgrade to the 8GB right off the bat? Backups are a problem with the Buffalo they have - how is the backup interface with this NAS - easy? We basically need a very fast NAS to allow for the on-going sharing of these large drawing files as well as images.

Your advice would be great.

Thank you

[MonsMagnus]

I currently use the 6202T. I upgraded it to 8gig, although I really didn't need to. (I did this in case I decide to run a virtual machine on it at some time in the future.) Using all gigabit Ethernet I average 117mb/sec when writing to this unit. I currently run Acronis on all of my local machines to do backups to this NAS and have never had any troubles.

I also have a QNAP TS251+ that is slower and has failed on me on a couple of occasions and had to be returned to QNAP. I currently have the QNAP setup to only power up once a week to receive an automated backup job from the AS6202T and then to power back down. That's how I would configure your client as well, use power scheduling on the Terrastation to turn it on, then setup an RSYNC job on the Asustor to backup critical files to the Terrastation , then power the Terrastation back down. Never rely on Raid 1 as your backup plan.

[MikeG.6.5]

My honest opinion....

Get more than the current requirements, so as growth happens, there's room for it. There's 2 avenues of thought on this, and both converge at some point. The 6202 model is limited to 2 internal drives. It's also got a CPU that isn't really up to heavy loads.

Buy at least a 4 bay model, (preferably a 6 or 8 bay.) And make sure the CPU can handle what it's being tasked to do. (7004T has an i3-4330 which you can still find in some new laptops at Walmart...)

I own a 7004T and my only major regret with it is that I didn't buy the 7008T or 7010T models. At over 30TB of media, I need the extra drive space now, and have to keep hanging externals on the NAS to make up for the shortcoming.

[linkoitweb]

Thank you so much for the information - I appreciate it.