I am trying to help a small company setup their first NAS. its a media firm with a lot of laptops and a lot of images and videos. currently they store everything locally and want an easy way their stuff gets backed up. the laptops are a mix of macs and windows computers.
I was thinking a 12 bay synology with 1tb SSD drive for caching and 11x6tb wd red NAS drives in SHR-2. then i was going to setup a media folder in their laptops with sync'ing setup on their own home folders. i want one that is exandable to atleast 24 drives with a 2nd chassis.
eventually the company plans to setup a AD domain and have shared folders but they are bit ways away from there.
questions:
1) any specific synology models? do all 12 bay ones support expansion?
2) SSD sounds like a good idea but not sure of real life experience.
3) is link aggregation necessary? there will be ~20 concurrent users about half on wifi.
4) going with synology as that is the only brand i know how to use but are there other clearly better choices?
Some points for you to consider;
This company needs more than one NAS (I would suggest identical hardware and setup) with one backing up the other. In addition to multiple external drives backing up the data on a weekly/monthly schedule and being stored off site.
Do not fall for any 'expandable' NAS storage scheme. The prices are ludicrous and a fully functional third NAS at that point is a much better option (don't break a working system).
Make sure you have identical/new hdd's for all NAS boxes you have ready to be swapped as drives fail (I suggest at least half of the drives being used in the NAS to be available in 'minutes' of an emailed error message).
SSD's are a good idea for the mobile computers they use and can certainly boost the responsiveness of their desktop systems. But SSD's for a NAS (even as a caching drive) are not worth it by a long shot for a 'media firm' with medium to large files (guess). Unless everyone has access to the NAS at 10GbE speeds or higher and the SSD's are in a multi-drive RAID array (RAID0, RAID10, RAID5, RAID6, etc.).
I myself would consider QNAP, but QNAP or Synology are the only two to consider in any event.
Btw, with only 20 users total and half the users on WiFi, Link Aggregation is probably not needed (see below), but it would be a noticeable improvement if there are times when the network and NAS were used concurrently by all.
For actual setup, I would recommend the following:
The first Two drives in a RAID1 array to host the NAS os (this is to prevent a single flakey drive from bringing down the whole NAS). This is necessary because at least part of the os is on the first drive or array.
The next 3 drives in RAID5 (x3). This is where the user data will be kept. On three RAID5 arrays on each physical NAS.
The final drive will be used as a hot spare.
With two identical NAS' setup as above, I would segregate the users to one NAS or the other (and both NAS' backing up to the other). One way may be the WiFi users on one NAS (expected slow responsiveness) and the others on the other NAS (wired, high performance expected). Or, if the scheduling of about half the workers doesn't overlap with the others? Put each concurrently working group on one NAS and the other concurrent workers on the other NAS.
The idea being that you are physically load balancing the NAS resources by whatever method works best for that company and its workloads.
Taking all the above to their logical conclusion (2x 12 bay NAS', 12 external USB drives (rotated weekly, two at a time) and about a dozen spare drives, this gets expensive really fast. The easiest way to get the company to get on board with this is to show the benefits of each step above. I haven't found any company that wants to continue doing business say no to the above yet (even if some have deferred the implementation of the above for a few short months until funds were more readily available).
