Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2012

Buying the right NAS device for your home lab.

Buying the right NAS device for a vSphere home lab is not an easy task. This blog post documents the decision process you should go through IMHO. First, decide which data you are going to put on it. Lots of people buy a NAS for secondary data only (I.e. backups), but in a home lab, there's probably primary data too. How important is the data , and do you require a backup of this primary data? Then, think about the volume of data you need. Is it 1TB, more like 5TB, or rather 10TB? Number three, protection level. No one wants to lose data, but how badly? Surviving one disk failure is a minimum, but a RAID5 set enters its "danger zone" when that happens. That means an additional failure will make you lose all the data on the set. The danger zone ends after you've replaced the failed disk and it's contents have been rebuilt. RAID6 enters the danger zone after losing a second device before the first is rebuilt. Kn ow your danger zone ! A fourth decision is spe