Simple NAS or file server?

Question

Iron

There is a small office, about 5 jobs in it work in CAD systems. It is necessary to make sure that all the projects that employees work with are stored centrally in one place, and access to them is carried out over the network.
In this regard, the question arose which equipment is better to use as storage: NAS or file server?
The budget is small, so we are talking about either a branded second-hand server with Windows Server on it, or a new inexpensive NAS.

Answer 1

Some kind of NAS like Qnap - at the same time, it can perfectly pretend to be a server, and then its additional features will be revealed in the form of a bunch of services that are interesting for a small office, such as various chats, forums, clouds, ip-telephony, video surveillance, etc.

Answer 2

Small budget

Only a license for WinServer will gobble up your entire budget and will not choke even once.
If there are no people, at least a little chopping in linux, take a NAS. There is a "friendly" shell in which people who know only Windows work quite well.

Answer 3

My solution.
PC with a processor from Pentium
RAM from 4GB
Normal ventilated case like Zalman Z3.
Pair of disks for software RAID.
Cheap and angry
There is installed either Linux or special software on Linux. Lightweight and easy to set up like openMediaVault. It can be deployed quickly and is stable. Read about him, he is ready.
Another option is to hire a one-time freelancer who will deploy it, it's not expensive. And more reliable than the Windows version

Answer 4

For your purposes, some Synology DS218 or ASUSTOR AS1002T or similar is more than enough.