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NAS for AFTER EFFECTS Projects. 4 machines working at the same time
Hi everyone
I need to buy a NAS for working with After Effects projects. VFX , Compositing tons of footage layers. 3D in Maya. Visual Effects Projects.
I have 4 machines. 2 Mac 2 PC. I need to improve my current 4 LOCAL HDD workflow. Because each machine work at local RAID 0 storage.
I need a NAS or another way to work with all my footage and projects centralized in order to be protected from HDD errors and having all the footage in the same HDD NAS configuration.
I am not sure how much Bandwith, Data Rate etc I need from this NAS to avoid performance issues with 4 machines working at the same time. HD projects. May be one of them could be need to work with 4K projects
I am not sure if a need 1 Gig-E or 10 Gig-E.Thanks in advance for you help
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3 Replies
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Hi Andres – Good information to start out. A few additional questions.
– Are AE & Maya the only two applications you are using, or are there any other applications?
– Can you give more details on your local RAID0 HDD set up? Are those internal or external? What type/size of drives are those? Any specifics would help.
– You didn’t mention anything about improving performance, is the performance on local workstations enough for you? Or is that something you need to improve as well?Best,
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems
nathaniel@promax.com -
Hi Nathaniel. Thanks for answer
it is not a matter of performance. It is a matter of safety purpose for projects and footage, and having the footage centralized in one NAS, instead of having them spread in four LOCAL HDD machines.
Yes, our main softwares are AE and Maya. PF track, Photoshop. Ilustrator. We work in Visual Effects and motion graphics. We are not editors.
We have not issues with LOCAL HDD. But we have all footage spread. I am concerned about loosing performance if the NAS setup is not correct.
We still are not working in 4K but we all know that it is coming sonly.
I would need to know how much bandwith I need for this NAS. How much data rate it needs to deliver. 1 Giga-E or 10 Giga-E ? etc
Andres Bocan
Visual Effects Supervisor
Pol-ka Producciones
Argentina -
It’s hard to say generically what performance you need. However, if what you have is working fine from that standpoint; you could bench mark your local drives with a tool like the Blackmagic speed test. That at least gives you a baseline for what you are looking for.
1GbE vs 10GbE, somewhat depends on that baseline. If your current set up is pushing substantially more than 90MB/s you may want to go 10GbE otherwise, you’ll probably see a drop in performance (I know that’s not your need, but you don’t want to change 1 problem for another).
It’s pretty rare I have clients working in the applications you mentioned that don’t want to go 10GbE, so without any benchmarks that is definitely safe. The cost has also come down quite a bit on the 10GbE hardware.
If you want to discuss further or chat with one of our dealers they may be able to help as well (with our product or other options).
Just shoot me at note at nathaniel@promax.com if you’re interested in chatting more.
Best Regards,
N
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