NAS In question

[combine]

Hello All,
I live near yellowstone park way in the middle of noplace. We all do have fiber optic in the ground though.
We have these two computers with two installs of outllook and the contacts can not be shared. I plan to use a program like OUTLOOK SYNC to solve that problem. We also have many pictures and use photoshop a lot. I plan on ether a Solid State drive or 2 10krpm drives raided together.
We need to have our pictures in one place so we can get them organized and keep them updated... our contacts as well see. I need fast access to the pictures. So I guess a Solid State drive or a raid setup will saturate a 1000 ethernet or not ? When or if I get this setup, will I be able to go to my excell program and tell it to SAVE as and be able to save it on the server ? Or Will I be able to use "save as" in photoshop and browse to the server ? Also I talked about Saturation , Can a nas server saturate a 100/1000 ethernet ? Or is this going to slow us down ? We normally have two people viewing files with word excell and photoshop also a lot with outlook.
We might use a custom database like ACT. Where is the bottle neck normally in a setup like this The router
the cables the nic ? Maybe I should just make a share on one computer and put a fast drive in that one computer ? It might make my life simpler ? That is the plan for now.

 

[anodos]

Saturating a gigabit NIC is not difficult and won't require purchasing SSD or 10k drives. FreeNAS has a steep learning curve and getting the right hardware is expensive. You will probably be better served getting a prebuilt NAS like this one and configuring it in RAID10. The option of creating a network share on one of the computers is also good.

Whatever solution you choose you need to address the following topics:
(1)Access (who should be able to access this data? Will all users be on the same physical network? Do I have remote users?)
(2)Redundancy (Can my data survive a single hard drive failure? What sorts of failure can my setup survive?)
(3)Backups (If you only have one copy of your data - even if it's on a server - you do not have a backup).

You seem to be on the right path for (1) and (2). Make sure that you think of a way to handle (3).