I have two TrueNAS servers that I set up here for my small family ranch business. The first one started life as a FreeNAS build in a media case with 6 hot-swap bays, 6 4TB drives in ZFS2. I quickly outgrew that and resilvered in 8TB drives. Two years ago, I resilvered 18TB drives and added a 7th drive as a “hot swap” spare.
I also have a second almost identical secondary system that I RSync the Primary to every night.
As a small business that takes a ton of cattle photos and generates a lot of videos, this has been a great system for storing and accessing files anywhere on my local network. I am only running about 40% usage, so have snapshots back over a year.
So… last night I was talking to a friend that works for a surveying company. He was complaining that every time they had a big project, they had to move files off their server. I asked him how big was their server, and he told me it was only 8TB. I was shocked. Those surveyors generate huge files when they do a point cloud survey. No wonder they are having problems.
I told him they needed a system like mine. Recommended they start with six-8TB drives in ZFS2 for about 30TB of usable space, and then when the time comes, they can resilver the drives for more space.
Since I am no expert at all, I was having problems telling him what all he should do. And I really don’t know what they need, but I know that what I have would be far superior to their current server.
His company drops $10,000 on autocad subscriptions a year and probably more for their point cloud software. $100K on a couple of drone systems, and untold amounts of money on their Total Station equipment. I am dumbfounded that they don’t have a bigger and more robust server.
Can anybody point me to a case study of a system like they would need?