should my NAS be dropping frames when capturing PAL footage?

[Chris Craig]

Sorry, i should have also mentioned that i do have a macmini server, but i don’t use it for anything other than playing videos or music to the apple tvs in the house. Just in case this would help with my setup.
Thanks

[Bob Zelin]

While I am no expert in the sinology product line, it appears that you are doing many things wrong, including purchasing the wrong unit. The 1515+ is a 5 bay (not enough drives for 3 users reliably). It is a 1G box, and you say you are connected to a switch – this means that you are sharing all 3 computers over a 1G port – big mistake. You would be better off plugging directly into the 4 1G ports on this box, and assigning separate subnets. The 1515+ only has 4G of RAM, you should have at least 16. There is no option for a 10G port to feed a 10G switch.

Again, I am no expert in the product line from sinology, and I recommend other brands, but at first guess from 2 minutes of research, had you purchased the Synoloyg DS2015xs, you would have an 8 drive system with 10G ports that could go to a 10G switch, or at least a 10G uplink switch, to improve your bandwidth and performance.

So what do you do now ? I don’t know – you bought the wrong box.
Try getting rid of your switch and plug directly into the 1G ports (assign static IP addresses), and see if that helps. But with only 5 drives and 4G of RAM, I don’t know what will happen. This is not a word processing application – this is pro video, which uses tons of bandwidth.

The DS1515+ is $709. I don’t know how you can have a working shared storage system for this price.

Bob Zelin

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

[Chris Craig]

Hi Bob

Thanks very much for your reply.

I do not know much about networking and have obviously fallen for a well-rounded marketing campaign from Synology (also budget requirements). I assumed for my needs of capturing DV footage, the 1515+ would be well equipped to handle 3 streams of 25Mb/s (possibly more)

The machines with a single ethernet port still need to connect to the internet when not being used for video capture. If i connected just one of the synology ports to the switch, would this then allow for the other machines to connect online through it?

Having never setup static IP addresses before, i have found this simple article online to help me (https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/22161/how-to-set-up-a-static-ip-in-mac-os-x/) Is this what you were advising?

Thanks again for your help.

[Alex Gardiner]

Bob is right. Remove that switch from the equation!

Try connecting each client to a dedicated port on the 1515+ ( it looks like it has 4 available). In fact, it is generally a good idea to have a separate network for video work. Unless you have a switch that is known to work for this kind of thing, try to avoid using one.

Simple things to look at…

* What does Blackmagic Disk Speed Test report for offending network drives? (not going to tell you much, but worth a look – should easily hit 110MB/s over gigabit)

* What application you are using for capture?

Generally try to be on a later OS X release if you can (Yosemite or newer, although assuming you are).

I think Synology use a Samba 4 server, but I don’t own one, so can’t check. If so, you will find later OS X releases tend perform better over SMB, for various reasons. Your synology box can probably do AFP & NFS as well, which might be worth a try.

The truth is your milage is going to vary.

Unfortunately as already mentioned, it may be that the 1515+ is not up to the job. A customer of ours had two for general near-line purposes and from what I remember the performance was rather average.

alex@indiestor.com
Open Source Shared Storage

[Chris Craig]

Hi Alex and thanks for your reply

I have done what was suggested by Bob, and have connected each lan to the 4 available ports on the synology. I have run the blackmagic speed test and there is no noticeable difference in the write read resuts. They are coming in at around 104/105MB/s for PAL and around 123 for NTSC.

I have not yet assigned static ip addresses

Im using the latest OSX and have been using the latest version of premier to capture. I also use vidi on one machine as i dont have an additional adobe licence and its a freeware program purely for capturing video. I used to capture using iMovie, but since moving to Synology, it does not permit capturing to this type of drive.

The advertising on the synology webpage suggests write speeds of upto 400MB/s so i have detainaly mis-intrepreted that.

What should i then be looking at to purchase for my needs?

Thanks a lot

[Bob Zelin]

Hi –
there is nothing that you can buy. The theoretical bandwidth of 1G Ethernet is 125 MB/sec. In real life you are lucky if you get 100 MB/sec over a 1G connection. Without a 10G connection, you cannot get any greater than this.

400 MB/sec is the TOTAL bandwidth available on your Synology box. Want more total bandwidth, buy a box with more drives in it.

Bob Zelin

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