At the (home) office I have a Synology RS2416+ with a few drives running in Synology’s Hybrid RAID mode. I have a mix of Windows, Linux and Mac clients running Time Machine backups in addition to standard SMB and NFS file access. The NAS itself has plenty of disk space and plenty of RAM but lately its performance has been abysmal and its gotten worse with every client I’ve added to the network....
When it comes to your infrastructure, whether in the home or at work you really don’t want to mess around with storage. It’s where your precious pictures, media and business files reside. Commonly storage has resided on the computer’s internal disk. This has always been a risky proposition with little in the way of protection should the internal disk fail. External storage had a brief surge of popularity with plasticky USB drives for $99 sprouting everywhere....
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Or so the saying goes. When specifying and buying computer hardware it saves time and money knowing the level of performance you get with your existing equipment and the performance you can expect from your new purchase. There are numerous metrics to measure but in order to obtain meaningful results (relatively) quickly I personally focus on CPU, memory and file and network I/O....
In the early days of our startup, bubblegum and duct tape seemed to be the order of the day as we struggled to keep things running on cheap as chips computers bought off ebay and a ragtag bunch of borrowed Dell Optiplexes. Developer files sat on their individual machines, source code was scattered across the place and the concept of centralised document storage was a share on one of the developer machines called Common in which everyone dumped their stuff....