NAS for Home Business Editing, 3 Macs

[Bob Zelin]

. Should we move in the direction of NAS?
Or what are your thoughts on having an Airport Extreme as a router and connecting a WD Elements hard drive into that as a server? Will that work?

REPLY – it is sad for me to see what is happening to our industry.
I come from a time when a single Sony VTR was $50,000, and you had to have 3 of them, to do a dissolve (plus a switcher and an edit controller and an audio mixer). When AVID came out, it was about $80,000 – too much for many people. Over the years the prices have dropped.

Today, budget brands like QNAP and Synology exist, but it appears that even under $2000 plus the cost of SATA drives is way too much money for many users. This certainly applies to modern 10G switches, which used to range (and still cost by some companies) between $15,000 – $25,000, and today, you can get a 10G switch for $500 – $600 dollars. But again, this is still WAY too much money for many users.

So when I see your post – “can I use an Airport Extreme as a router and connect a WD Elements hard drive into that as a server – will that work” –
I am old and tired. I am getting tired of fighting, and being insulting.

I have many professional companies calling me, asking me to promote their shared storage system, and ask “why do you always promote QNAP” – well, it’s because QNAP is cheap – a fraction of the price of other products that cost many time that mount. But you see – no matter how cheap a QNAP is – the real answer is that many people want a solution that will cost $200 for a WiFi router, and plug a drive into it, and that is your shared storage.
What can I say. What can all the professional manufacturers say any more.

NO AJ Jasche. Do more jobs, save your money, get several thousand dollars together, and then you can have shared storage for 3 computers that will do exactly what you want.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Blaise Douros]

Echoing Bob; you can get into an incredibly well-performing QNAP system for a couple thousand bucks that has terabytes and terabytes of space. If you consider the NAS system your “online” drive, and use your old drives to archive and/or back up your outdated content, you can get by for a long time with that as your main storage system.

No, you can’t do shared video storage with any kind of WiFi. Forget it!

My advice is to budget about $7000-$8000 for this system, and hire Bob to help you get it specced out and set up remotely–he is incredibly knowledgeable about this kind of system, and his very reasonable fee is worth every penny. It might seem like a lot of money at first, but let’s be honest–we’d all spend that in seconds on a new camera system, and you will use a shared storage system like this practically every second of every day. It’s not sexy like a camera, but it will save you SCADS of time, and works really well. It’s been a great investment for my company’s video team.

[Edan Cohen]

“… you will use a shared storage system like this practically every second of every day. It’s not sexy like a camera, but it will save you SCADS of time, and works really well. It’s been a great investment for my company’s video team.”

Truth! If you have multiple workstations, investing in a decent NAS will be life-changing.

With that said, let’s go easy on AJ. If AJ is only 5TB/year it’s a safe bet that they aren’t in a position to blow $7-8k on a NAS. Some of us shoot 5TB per project.

I am currently setting up a NAS for my small video firm. Once I have it set up and running I’ll write up a blog post and share it with you, AJ. All told, I am spending around $3k, which I know isn’t cheap, but you’ll definitely have to invest some real money to get results.