@ntoxicator said:

Unless there is another distributed file solution that can make work for their Mac / Apple eco-system.

If they happen to be using Gmail for their email you may want to look at AODocs. Amazon WorkDocs is another option.

@ntoxicator said:

Always complaining to me the slowness of mac's even though they're spec'd accordingly. Soon as you kill dropbox.. runs fine. had to implement alot of QoS on their network to throttle DB traffic.

Did you make any changes to the LAN Sync feature in Dropbox? I've always seen big improvements when blocking cloud sync services over WLAN within the office via endpoint software. e.g. Symantec

BTW: I reached out to Cameron at Kingston about this, just to get a manufacturer's opinion. (I also invited him to join the forum as Kingston has been very helpful with demos and stuff.) Same as what the experts here have said. 🙂

He said:
TRIM is not as critical today as it was several years ago. The SSD controllers now do a good job at garbage collection which is effectively trying to accomplish the same thing by trying to keep the invalid data areas empty for new writes to come in efficiently. We've studied the performance affects of TRIM in our labs here at Kingston and have found that most reputable SSD manufacturers today are making SSD's that perform well whether TRIM is enabled or not on the operating system.

TRIM support is definitely necessary from a marketing standpoint but less necessary from a technical stand point at this point in time.

Very cool! 🙂 Small world! Glad to hear the community here has others from upstate NY

@LAH3385 might be good to start a thread and try to determine what your needs are before going down the path of technology. By the time you were asking this question, you were already in pretty deep assuming certain products, product categories and platform HA. We should start with a business needs analysis, use that to set goals and then use the goals to select technology approaches.

@Reid-Cooper said:

@MattSpeller said:

@Reid-Cooper said:

@BRRABill Can't be more than $2!! Right? Memory at that size is so freaking cheap!! Seems like 2GB would be a more logical minimum size.

$2 multiplied by 500,000 units - not going to happen lol

You can easily charge $3 for that kind of upgrade, though!!

Then how do you upgrade them to the WD My Cloud EX5? 😉

@dafyre said in Hot Swap vs. Blind Swap:

@scottalanmiller said in Hot Swap vs. Blind Swap:

@dafyre said in Hot Swap vs. Blind Swap:

@scottalanmiller said in Hot Swap vs. Blind Swap:

Intel has started calling Blind Swap - "Surprise Hot Plug".

Because you're surprised when you blindly swap the right drives?

The system is surprised, to say the least.

Also: Holy Necropost, Batman!

Ha, but with new updates.

Here is the CentOS / Red Hat documentation talking about hot swapping with MD.

Yeah, no question that everything medical in America is awful. You know it is bad when all of the Americans living in Nicaragua rave about the healthcare here!

@ryan-from-xbyte said:

In the interest of reliability and compatibility, we opted to only support enterprise level SSDs. We actually only recently supported non-Dell drives because of those same reasons. We started talking with Edge and found a partner who would co-developer firmware to limit the risk to our customers. If Dell makes a firmware change, we didn't want our customers to experience any issues with their drives.

That what made me reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally nervous about non-DELL drives.

Not that anything would happen, but the last thing you need is some change form DELL and then your drives stop working, or booting.

Total BS that they do that, but whatever. It's their company and there are other options.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

He does have on board hardware RAID. The problem is not his card but his hot swap bays.

You mean because of the lack of empty caddies? Sure I understand that, but I addressed that in my post.

oh, meaning rip the caddies off. I didn't understand what you were implying. That makes more sense.

Exactly. I've considered doing the same for my HP server.

@scottalanmiller said:

Where DNS != DNS

That was CONFUSING

I knew exactly what @scottalanmiller issue was when I read his post.. I updated my post for clarity.

I bet the primary case is buildings burning down and people making off with the server from the ashes 😉

I've heard of people having fires, not heard of anyone having a stolen server in the real world. Even with SMBs rarely doing anything to protect against it.

I like the sound of it as well. Hopefully it will be recorded too.

Not really. I'll do it in a few years when it's time to upgrade disks. But most of that will end up in Amazon Cloud Drive soon.

That is the biggest question, really. And also, if it was saved as a DOCX or an ODT from LibreOffice.

@StrongBad said in Backup System For 5 PC SMB:

@BRRABill said in Backup System For 5 PC SMB:

@StrongBad

I think the final takeaway, especially for non-IT folk, is to move away from a system that requires this sort of backup.

Ideally, of course.

The age old answer ... "depends"

Looping back to this, in the past month I've worked with three different companies that all experienced significant data loss or downtime because of their choice of FreeNAS. Two suffered from not having front loaded their engineering and had an inability to support their servers during routine operations and caused major outages because of it along with significant cost for repairs, and one company that lost its data because of unnecessary bugs in the FreeNAS GUI code that would have been avoided has they been simply on FreeBSD.

Additionally this past week FreeNAS 10 "Coral" was demonstrated to be so incredibly unstable a month after being released that they had to recall the release and revert to a "beta" status indefinitely. For a trivial end user application this would be bad, for a critical storage infrastructure component on which companies need to have rock solid faith, it's unthinkable.

@dafyre said:

@scottalanmiller said:

That's why comparing 500GB to 500GB for a "Watt per GB" comparison.

I assume we're talking average... Some HDDs are set to time out and switch to low power mode and stuff... and some folks (like me) go in and turn that off). SSDs have the advantages of not having to spin up or down. They simply draw less power.

Spinning down a Winchester drive dramatically increases its chance of death. So would increase costs in other places. Not sure if that would save money over the drives lifespan or not since it easily cuts 75% of the lifespan off.

@BRRABill said:

It seems as though you can install another DC, then replicate, then demote the EVAL one.

But I think I'll just go with not doing that. 🙂

Yes, it wouldn't be a functional AD if you could not do that. You risk schema issues, though.