I'd go up to RAID 6 for additional fault tolerance. It takes the death of
three disks to kill RAID 6, and backup to something. For twice the price
you can buy a second NAS and backup to that, or if you have a LTO library
handy you could write to multiple tapes depending on what's important.

Beyond that, I'm not much of a hardware freak. Spoiled by enterprise
solutions and enterprise service contracts I suppose. :)

On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 11:59 PM, Ryan Coleman <ryan.coleman at cwis.biz> wrote:

> 90 days and $17,000 later I have my 13TB array recovered.
>
> Thank goodness for business insurance!
>
> So I have the need to build a bigger, better, smarter storage system.
> Presently I'm looking at 16x3TB drives and a RAID 5 running in ESXi... But
> it's time to consider alternatives... NAS, SAN, something.
>
> I've avoided ZFS talk for years because it never applied, and FreeNAS is
> definitely up my alley with 14 years FreeBSD experience - but what would
> you do? Primary function is long-term data storage but also serving up many
> network services as well as development projects.
>
> I have an LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i with a SAS expander and would be maxing out
> the 16 RAID drives for that if I go with a RAID but I really want knowledge
> on personal experiences with various NAS options.
>
> One requirement: Must be iSCSI capable with ESXi 5.5 (free license). ESXi
> machine is super-loaded (6 core Sandy bridge Xeon and 32GB) but was design
> for the future growth.
> _______________________________________________
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> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
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>
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