Is Unraid a wise choice for my office?

[mmmann]

I'm considering the creation of a large file server for my current, Windows-based office. After much research, I've decided that Unraid could work: the data is important and needs some mild level of redundancy; the data can be segmented--it can fit on individual drives and thus backed up easily; the throughput req'd is within the constraints of spinning platters.

 

My question: would I be making a terrible mistake entrusting my current, reliable, NTFS data to a Linux SMB share? Look at this, directly from the forums, here:

 

"SMB is a very finicky and often seems more like witchcraft is needed to getting it to work...The problems range from no GUI, login requests from Windows when the user thinks he is just using a guest account, Windows 10 problems, Local Master issues, PC's that can't find the server when others can, slow transfer issues, can't get to the server via SMB, hardware issues, physical networking issues, and probably fifteen more that escape me at this moment."

 

Maybe it's a mistake to hang my drives off a separate box running Unraid, presenting them as SMB, parceled out over Ethernet and its overhead. I hate to be locked into Microsoft and their tax, but I need reliability above all else. Maybe I should look at a big, multi-core server with direct-attached drives, split into virtual machines, running Windows Server and et al.

 

I would value any feedback from the community, here.

[ashman70]

I would consider any of the following alternatives:

 

Cloud based sharing

A named brand NAS from Qnap or Synology

 

Unraid is fantastic, I love it for home use, would I use it at work no. Why? Several reasons, but the biggest is that support is forum based, and you simply don't want to using something for mission critical data that has only forum based support. You need to be able to pick up the phone and call a support line or start a web chat with a support agent, anyone from your office needs to be able to do this, in case you are ill or on vacation. Putting something like unRAID in your office entrusts it's support to you and you only, not a good idea.