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RAID Setup Advice
Hey Everyone, I was really hoping I could get some advice from some professionals who have gone through the NAS RAID setup debacle before. Here’s the story
I work for a small post production company. we have 4 late 2015 27″ imac workstations and currently our workflow consists of trading USB 3 hard drives around as needed. This creates some bottlenecks as sometimes one person will need to work on creating captions for a film while someone else needs to work on authoring a DVD or Bluray, and a third person might need to cut a trailer at the same time.
So I want to try and get a NAS set up in the office so we can all work on our projects at the same time without swapping drives all the time. we need to have about 20 TB of RAID storage networked to 4 workstations, with a connection fast enough for us all to potentially be editing Prores422 HQ on Adobe Premiere Pro. I know 10G Ethernet would be plenty fast but the cost is a real concern, we don’t have a lot of money to try and put into this thing. SO my question is, would 1G Ethernet be fast enough for us to accomplish this? Have any of you done this before?
Our plan is to buy a pre-built Raid like a qnap or Synology, but the connection speed issue is the real concern I have at this point.
What other concerns am I overlooking?
Thanks everyone! -
5 Replies
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you want to spend as little money as possible, or get a “better” system.
The least expensive QNAP you can get is the TVS-873e with the QNAP QXG-10G1T 10G option card ($89 bucks). This plugs into a 10G switch (cheapest one is the QNAP QSW-1208-8C – under $600 bucks). Plug in all your computers, and you are in business. The TVS-873e is under $1300, and you need EIGHT matching drives.
HGST 6TB NAS drives are currently $180 each, and you need eight drives.For the Synology, you need the DS1817+ (not the DS1817) and the Intel X550-T2 10G card, and the same QNAP switch I mentioned above. The DS1817+ with 8 gig RAM is $919. I don’t have a quick price on the 10G card, and you need the eight drives. After RAID 6 you will have 48 TB of usable storage.
Isn’t there anything cheaper that will work – NO.
Are there better systems for a little more money – YES.Have more questions ? Ask away …………….. I do this every day .
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
Wow, thank you for so much information! That answers my question that a 1G network won’t do it.
I only have one follow up question on this. Our workstations don’t have 10Gbe cards in them so they will only get 1Gb Speeds correct? would they each get the full 1Gb speed or would that be split somehow?
Thanks for all your help Bob! -
The QNAP 10G port goes into a switch, like the QNAP QSW-1208-8C. This will give you 7 available ports to plug in 7 computers – either 1G or 10G. The switch will “split” the 10G bandwidth for you, so that all 4 editors can work at the same time.
If you have a 1G connection from each computer, and you have this 1G ethernet port going into the switch, you will get 100 MB/sec per edit computer. 100 MB/sec is plenty for any 1080i, 1080p or 720p signal, and “enough” for some compressed 4K formats. But as you get to better 4K codecs, like ProRes – you are pushing this limit, and if you don’t have enough bandwidth you will get stuttering video. How to solve this – easy – buy a thunderbolt to 10G adaptor your your Macs (thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 3) – and if they are Win 10 PC’s – get a 10G NIC card for that PC, which will go into a x4 or greater PCIe slot. Then you will get crazy fast speeds to do 4K, 6K and 8K editing.
A NIC card is typically between $100 – $280 each.Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
your workstations are four 2015 iMac’s. This means they are Thunderbolt 2 computers.
You would purchase either Sonnet Twin 10G’s or Promise SanLink2’s for these to be your 10G adaptor.
They are about $500 each. If you are NOT doing 4K and 6K editing, then you can avoid this purchase at this time.Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
You’ve gone above and beyond! Thank you
This answers all my questions and then some! we currently aren’t doing 4K and 6K editing but we don’t know what the future will be so being able to make that upgrade later is great! This is great information that I can pitch to my bosses for sure!
Thanks again!
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