[Steve Remich]

What’s the issue? It’s an earnest question.

[Steve Remich]

Definitely not a kid, but I’ll just let that go and move on. And hopefully they are reading it, because 8TB drives are currently selling for under $200 on amazon. What can I say, progress marches on and cheers to QNAP and Synology…

Thanks for your responses and input. The one last question I have is if you have any thoughts on the QNAP TS-873 box (filled with 8TB iron wolf drives in RAID 6 ????, upgraded to 16GB of RAM and fitted with a 10Gbe aquantia card). Decent box? P.O.S.? No opinion/haven’t used it?

It has a quad-core AMD processor, which obviously isn’t as good as the 6-core Intel processor in the 872XT, but do you think it would be a bottleneck for use as a video editing server in a small studio situation? I’ve read other posts where you’ve said that QNAP NAS boxes are a minefield of good and crap and I’m not sure where this one falls on that scale. I also haven’t been able to find many useful, real-world reviews.

The thought was if Thunderbolt 3 performance is going to be “disappointing”, maybe it would be better to get an 8-disk box without it and put more money into 10gbe cards/adapters for every computer.

-Steve

[Steve Remich]

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Just a few followups:

1.) Good to know. Thanks. I thought this might be the case, but wasn’t sure.

2.) My thinking on choosing RAID 0 paired with a consistent, external backup was partially based upon this article (https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/), which argues that RAIDs 5 and 6 provide a false sense of protection as drive size increases since the chance you’ll actually be able to rebuild a RAID after a drive failure without encountering a read error that stops the rebuild becomes less.

Is that article contrary to your experience? Are you or your clients successfully rebuilding RAID 5/6 setups with large (~6+ TB) disks after a disk failure without encountering read errors? I genuinely want to know as the article was written a long time ago. The prudent solution is of course to do both (RAID 5/6 with consistent on-site and off-site backups), but I was just curious about your experience.

3.) Good to know. Is 16GB enough then? Should we get more than that?

4.) You don’t think Thunderbolt 3 would be fast enough to edit HD proxies? Our planned setup is for one computer to access proxies to edit (connected via Thunderbolt 3) and the second (connected via 10Gbe) to color grade and export. I figure we can always add a 10Gbe switch later, if both machines need the speed.

My main question is: Can you access data via a Thunderbolt/USB connection and 10gbe simultaneously, or does everything has to go through one of the network connections? This will be our first NAS setup and I just don’t know.

6.) Alas, if it were only $333, or if we didn’t have other, major purchases to make, it wouldn’t be an issue. However I’m doing my best to get 30-40TB of reliable storage that’s fast enough for two people to edit from for $3k all-in, which, on the surface at least, doesn’t seem like asking for the moon.

Again, thanks for taking the time and sharing your knowledge.

-Steve