[Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build

[Richard Pieri]

On 7/3/2015 4:30 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
> I plan to build a freenas box.  I can get a 24-bay 4U case and build
> into it for about the same price as a synology that can only hold half
> the disk space and a fraction of the ram..

Neither of which are microservers.

> the disk and ram was the vast majority of the price.

If you compare the two with no (or minimal) storage then you'll find 
that the prices are pretty close to each other. Drives is where the 
gouging is these days.

Last year I specced out some high-end compute servers (2 by Xeon 
10-core, 384GB) with a pile of storage (80TB) from Dell and IBM. The 
compute portions were essentially identical prices. The Dell storage was 
2 x 12-bay SAS storage arrays with SATA (NL-SAS) drives; the IBM storage 
was 2 x 12-bay SAS storage arrays with SAS drives. Both sets of storage 
arrays cost about the same.

The Dell SATA drives cost ~$14K *MORE* than the IBM SAS drives. You read 
that right. SATA drives on the order of twice the cost of SAS drives. 
Our Dell rep refused to budge on the price even after we showed him the 
IBM quote.

Dell did not get the sale.

-- 
Rich P.