Nas as small business domain based network file server

[RPT]

Does anyone has experiences using a NAS as small business file server in a Windows Server 2008 SBS domain based network?
Is NAS capable to serve as file server for near 20 users? Any examples or informative web links?

Purpose is to buy a Seagate or Zyxel NAS and to set up a 2 disk mirror RAID and to get rid of 10 years old Windows 2000 PC which is used as file server for 15 employers. But would it work as expected?
Users keep there all documents, create new ones and can access documents created by others.
Windows 2000 has reached also it's 10 user limit.

[einstein9]

better to use FREENAS easy to use.

There are many Open source NAS on the internet you can use anyone of those

i remember once i built mine (bootable cd with OS & Applications) and you save ur Conf. in external Flash
or floppy very easy

[pclab]

Yes, FreeNas is an excelent way to reuse again your 10 year old PC's.

[RPT]

Thanks for replies - but now the PC has reached it's end and I need to replace this file access server with something cheaper then another Windows Server with 20 client licenses. But unit has to be still reliable and then I thought, that perhaps a ready manufactured 2 disk NAS like from Seageate or Zyxel might solve the task.
What do you think how well these ready NAS boxes could handle multiple file accesses fro several users?
On the file server there are mostly Word documents which are opened and edited by 15 users.
I'd say - that this task isn't hard disk access intensive but what do you think?
Does anyone has any experiences using a factory made NAS box as multiple user file server?

[pclab]

I normaly use NAS for scheduled backups, but I think it will work OK for file server.
Probably you will need a good LAN speed too.

[RPT]

Nowadays LAN speed of factory NAS boxes is 1Gb, that seems to be a standard.
Sometimes some NAS boxes have been complained to be slow .... whatever it means ... I hope it's not the case when opening a MS Word file by 15 users and keeping open until saved back to NAS. Doesn't sound like a lot of sequential disk access ... but perhaps there reveals some other problem instead?
Unfortunately I haven't found any "success stories" based upon such solution.
That's why I left a posting here