[Paul Watton]

Thanks Bob. I understand about the drives and was planning on using a raid card in raid 5. We have 8 2tb drives we can potentially use but was going to start with 4 of them in raid 5 so they fit in the computer case.

I was just wondering how critical processing power and ram is to transfer speeds when it comes to the 4 port gb nic setup as opposed to a freenas software set up which seems to need lots of ram.

I am pretty knowledgeable when it comes to building my own editing workstations, been doing it for years but when it comes to server storage stuff it’s a whole new ball game.

Currently a pre-built system is not in the budget but I want to tinker and begin to familiarize myself with this stuff in the meantime. As you know the configurations and tinkering seems to be endless, but for me if I don’t have a physical machine to play with I just can’t wrap my brain around all the technical info. Building computers is a fun hobby. There are plenty of cheap parts out there I can begin to build a budget system and learn with it. If it doesn’t work then such is life, at least I learned stuff along the way but haven’t broke the bank doing it. When the time comes that we can invest in a pre-built pre-configured system for our studio, where we need that support and stability I will gladly be going that route and I will be more prepared and better equipped to know what exactly I need and what I am talking about when I chat with the guys who build them.

I have already done the rounds by inquiring with most of the company’s you had listed in previous forum topics and the biggest thing I learned was that I had very little idea what everyone was talking about. Largely because I know nothing about the server/shared storage world. In fact when I first started exploring the possibilities I didn’t even know how to google it. I didn’t know they were called shared storage solutions. Lol