[Russ D’arensbourg]

I’d assume that there is some protocol uitilized by the soft raid app which asserts priority over other applications. Such that you should not have corruption of data written to or read from the array.
I’ve never written a driver, but as I understand it, hardware level things are not allowed to be starved of CPU attention for the benefit of the software. Not that it doesn’t happen, but I haven’t seen anything like that since Windows XP.

What I’m more concerned about is whether the raid app/driver is so persistent in asserting priority, that it is impactful of system performance. Most NAS and DAS performance metrics I have seen do not address this aspect. Though one review of the Drobo 5D does note that there are some intermittent throughput slowdowns. It doesn’t note any dropped data.

[Russ D’arensbourg]

I’ve been looking into various storage solutions for my own purposes lately. I also used to work fro a cloud storage provider which was purchased by Lenovo/EMC.
Cloud storage is best suited for light and medium weight media that needs to accessed from multiple locations. It is not well suited to heavy weight mediums like digital video footage.
A couple roadblocks present themselves. Cloud storage is not architected for large contiguous files or realtime playback of HD footage.
Your files when they are uploaded to Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure or whomever, will be chopped up and scattered across hundreds of file servers in dozens of locations. This is great for your data to be redundantly protected against loss. It also means it takes forever to upload and download.

The cost of most cloud storage solutions is prohibitive for video workflows, even as backup. Just due to the sheer volume of data that even a short form project can entail. However AWS and I believe Azure have deals from time to time. I think Amazon has a deal right now which is free for a few months, then some nominal amount per year.

I’m thinking of setting one of those up as my offsite DR solution. But as others have said, upload and download will crawl. It is not anything you would want to deal with when you have a client on the phone.
You would still want local or network based storage to work with.
The cloud is not a panacea.