NAS (Synology) fast enough for FCPX?

[Shawn Convey]

OK now you are touching on something that I have found a bit confusing.
My Synology Box does have 4 gigbit LAN ports.
Does that mean that if I bought box it could transfer 4x the speed of a single Gigabit LAN
OR does this mean that it reduces bottlenecking when using multiple machines?
either way thanks again for your time and responses.

[Charlie Austin]

[shawn convey] “Does that mean that if I bought box it could transfer 4x the speed of a single Gigabit LAN
OR does this mean that it reduces bottlenecking when using multiple machines?”

No clue on that… someone posted something about “double ethernet” the other day, but that’s beyond my limited knowledge. 🙂 I was just thinking you could plug the Raid and 2 computers into a switch and both systems could access the Raid without any sharing setup needed. I’m not familiar with the synology box so that may even be how it’s intended to be used… no switch att all, just plug the computers into the Raid… maybe the 4 ports are a switch?

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[Noah Kadner]

If you have a computer with multiple ethernet ports you can try. I’d say experiment via an Amazon 30-day return policy. Too many variables to give you a definitive answer. You’ll probably be fine with this solution but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it’s bottlenecked in some way. These are just the last things I’d recommend for serious editing. I’d sooner just connect a decent external Thunderbolt drive and share it.

Noah

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[Joe Marler]

[shawn convey] “I would assume that if your LAN port is supplying the rest of the edit suites it can’t be transferring any quicker than the gigabit LAN port coming out of my Synology… is that thinking correct or am I missing something?”

You are correct. In general link aggregation (if available) increases ethernet backbone capacity, not point-to-point transfer performance. You can see some typical NAS performance numbers here: https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/nas/view and compare to posted numbers on directly attached storage using BlackMagic, QuickBench or other disk benchmarks.

You can also Google BlackMagic and whatever NAS you’re interested in and compare to variously directly-attached storage systems using that same benchmark.

Even though 100 MB/sec is no faster than a bus-powered USB portable drive, it is enough for editing H.264 HD video, even a few concurrent streams. It’s not because the NAS is so fast, but because the I/O demands are fairly modest. The data rate on H.264 HD video is limited by the compression and resolution.

OTOH if you ever intend to edit 4k or multiple streams of less-compressed video such as ProRes 422, you can encounter the I/O limit sooner. E.g, a single ProRes 422 stream at 1080p/30 is about 147 megabytes/sec. The BlackMagic benchmark helps by indicating whether your read/write performance is sufficient for various popular codecs and resolutions.

NAS definitely has advantages if sharing content between multiple editors.

[Walter Soyka]

I’d suggest posting this in the NAS forum:
https://forums.creativecow.net/networkattachedstorage

In fact, just reading through that forum will teach you a lot about throughput, latency, link aggregation, etc.

I will warn you in advance that if Bob answers your question, you might get a gruff answer — but you should listen to him because he knows his stuff.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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