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In my home i have 5 user using different computers and we have one server with vmware Esxi

on it to use for virtual machines

The problem i am having is storage i have desktop where i have stored 7 SATA hard drives

with around 20TB of data

I am really gotten sick of buying new hard drives because i cant add new ones because my bays are full so i have many old 500Gb , 1TB left out because of low capacity as i can replace 5 of them with one 4TB drive

I don't know much about SAN but i have seen that it has to do it SAS and fiber channel.

Is there any cheap solution where all LAN user acess the stroage , watch movies and i have one place where i can scale the storage and use olddrives as well

user1721949
  • 579

2 Answers2

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You do not need a SAN, you need a NAS. Here is the rule of thumb

  • Access to shared disks on a block level ... SAN
  • Access to shared file systems ... NAS

ESXi can use both, for the NAS option google for NFS on ESXi. My recommendation is to look at OpenFiler or similar options, this should be dirt cheap and easy.

Eugen Rieck
  • 20,637
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You are looking for a NAS, not a SAN. Here is a breakdown of the difference.

Here are a list of NAS devices that may work for you. Some of them have RAID built in, others are JBOD. What you choose will depend on your budget and redundancy needs.

Another option would be to get a cheap case that can hold a bunch of disks and run an OS like FreeNAS.

Keltari
  • 75,447