NAS vs. SAN

[Vitalix]

Hey guys and gals, I know this may not be the proper forum for this, but would like to hear some feedback from admins who have used both SAN and NAS, and let me know their opinion.

We are a multimedia company, so we have oodles of MPEGs and AVIs that we work on. We presently have a NAS (SNAP box) but are running out of room quick, and as we get more customers, we will be needing multiple terabytes by the end of next year.

I don't want to go with the NAS solution, which maxes at about 4TB for most units I've seen. The problem with NAS is that adding more units causes us to map more drives. This can get confusing for our graphic desginers.

From I hear of a SAN, one can just keep slapping drives into a SAN and it just keeps on growing, so your drive V: always stays drive V:, it just doubles in size one day.

Is this true? What are some advantages and disadvantages of NAS vs. SAN. Anyone have any pricing info as well?

Thanks in advance as always!

[hongt_99]

First question is what is your budget? SAN is expensive because you have to setup an infrastructure to support your san, this mean you need to buy, San Switch, HBA, Storage. The transfer rate between the server and storage is about 2 GB to 4GB depending on the HBA and san switch. NAS or Iscsi is cheaper because you just need to buy the storage and use existing ethernet infrastructure. If you are transfering extremely large files or database (SQL, Exchange) the San is a better solution, but keep the cost in mind.