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kittonian

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 4, 2008
178
53
Austin, TX
I have been searching for a solution for a small/medium business file server with incredibly fast speeds. The network is 100% mac based.

Of course I can use a Mac with a bunch of drives connected to it and then setup File Sharing and remotely mount the drives, but the issue is that all client computers that have these drives mounted have no shared trash, and thus the message "This file will be permanently deleted" always appears when deleting a file. Beyond that, users accidentally delete files all the time and this is unacceptable.

Also, using apps such as Pages or Numbers won't properly save the file automatically when it's accessed from a network share (the alert message appears and you have to manually click Save Anyway).

I've built XSan fiber based storage systems but XSan and macOS Server are no longer a thing. Plus, it's really expensive and there's little point when you can now run CAT8 wiring and achieve 40Gb/sec throughput (not that it even exists yet, but you know what I mean).

We're going with a Ubiquity 10Gb Enterprise switch so we can have 10Gb to each desktop, but I can't figure out how to properly setup a true file server where the above mentioned issues will not exist.

I looked at Synology but there's tons of users reporting issues with the Sonoma update. Sure, it'll be resolved but I am not interested in being dependent on some other company's expensive hardware that causes us to not be able to update our client's OS.

I don't need all the extra bells and whistles either. Just the standard stuff like file permissions and network trash. The array will be RAID 10 with 20TB drives.

I do not want to run any Windows server, but if necessary I can build another Linux server just to handle the file serving stuff. It would be great if there was a solution that did not require a separate server, or if it's absolutely required, it would be great to use a Mac if possible. Either way, I just want the best solution to solve the issues.
 

ChrisA

macrumors G5
Jan 5, 2006
12,923
2,183
Redondo Beach, California
I looked at Synology but there's tons of users reporting issues with the Sonoma update. Sure, it'll be resolved but I am not interested in being dependent on some other company's expensive hardware that causes us to not be able to update our client's OS.
What issues? It works fine. I'm using it now. The Synology servesSBM to a few Macs and serves NFS to the Linux systems. The data is also available to IOS devices.

The next step up from Synology would be https://www.truenas.com/

TrueNAS is based on BSD UNIX and uses the ZFS file system. It requires some high-end hardware and lots of RAM but today even 64GB of RAM is cheap.

Synology and TrueNAS are both very reliable but on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of the required skillset to use. Synology is very easy and is browser-based. TrueNAS tries to be that but actually you need some UNIX system admin skills

Also Synology can be low cost, only a couple hundred bucks for a low-end system but TrueNAS's entry point is a server-class PC with loads of RAM.

One more thing. Backup. You will need to find a way to do a redundant backup the NAS. This means either you buy three NASes and keep one of them offsite or you subscribe to a cloud backup service. Think about backup BEFORE you buy the NAS because options for each are different.

I use a "plus" series Synology for primary storage and then in another room have a cheaper "J" series for continuous backup and in addition I have a cloud service. This works well enough
 
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