NAS for small media production house

[Peter.c]

Hi, I am planning to build a NAS for my new production house office. We will have 2 video editors editing 4K ProRes video at the same time, with footage on the NAS. One is using FCPX, one is using Premiere Pro (If it helps). And 2 photo editors edit photos with Lightroom. 
Since I have experience on Unraid, I would like to use it for the NAS built. As we will encode videos on the NAS with VM. For the storage I would go for 3 WD Red 6TB + 1 1TB Samsung 860 EVO (as cache drive).

I would like to know what CPU platform I should go for, Intel or AMD? And is this setup capable for 2 video editors edit at the same time?

[Overbuilder]

ATM ryzen is the best option for price to perfomance, a nd the 2700x will give you 8 cores 16threads, so would handle it way better than the 8700k for example.

[Peter.c]

21 hours ago, Overbuilder said:

ATM ryzen is the best option for price to perfomance, a nd the 2700x will give you 8 cores 16threads, so would handle it way better than the 8700k for example.

Thanks. Which motherboard should I go for? Because I have never build a AMD machine

[Overbuilder]

any B450 motherboard would do the job, although depending on the number of drives you would like to be able to upgrade to in the future. I would recommend the MSI X470 GAMING PRO CARBON AM4 AMD X470 motherboard as it is one of the only motherboard with 8 SATA 6 GBPS ports, and has a lot of usb 3.1 ports so you can hook up fast external storage to it if you wanted to.

[dalekphalm]

@Peter.c make sure you have a proper backup strategy. RAID is not a backup.

 

You'll either want to create a second array, or an entirely separate NAS (Eg: a 2-bay QNAP off-the-shelf NAS), preferably located offsite.

 

If you opt for just creating a second array, then you can configure your NAS to replicate files from your primary array to your secondary array using a schedule (Eg: once a night). Depending on what NAS OS you use, you can setup snapshots, differential/incremental, etc.

[Electronics Wizardy]

On 12/20/2018 at 8:07 AM, Peter.c said:

Since I have experience on Unraid, I would like to use it for the NAS built.

Id stay away from that here. Unraid is pretty slow as youre reading and writing to one disk at a time. Something with a real raid array, like freenas, a hardware raid solution, storage spaces on windows and other solutions will be much faster.

 

Id look at proxmox for the OS, you get zfs that is much faster, and has good vm support. Do you need gpu for this transcoding?

 

For cpu, dual xeon might make sense here if you have multiple vms running. There pretty cheap for the performance, and support lots of ram and cards.

 

 

[Salv8 (sam)]

don't forget you need a network connection that can handle the amount of data that the editors will be using

i would recermend a 1GB connection for each editor (if you want some futureproof-ness get a 10GB nic on the server and connect it up to a switch that has a 1GB connections for each port, the ASUS XG-U2008 is a good example of what i mean switch wise)

[Peter.c]

On 12/23/2018 at 10:49 AM, Salv8 (sam) said:

don't forget you need a network connection that can handle the amount of data that the editors will be using

i would recermend a 1GB connection for each editor (if you want some futureproof-ness get a 10GB nic on the server and connect it up to a switch that has a 1GB connections for each port, the ASUS XG-U2008 is a good example of what i mean switch wise)

Thanks! I haven't think about the network solution yet. I think we will be switch to 10G network to the future. ASUS XG-U2008 will be great for our set up, as only 2 video editors need to have that kind of speed.

[Peter.c]

On 12/23/2018 at 12:47 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id stay away from that here. Unraid is pretty slow as youre reading and writing to one disk at a time. Something with a real raid array, like freenas, a hardware raid solution, storage spaces on windows and other solutions will be much faster.

 

Id look at proxmox for the OS, you get zfs that is much faster, and has good vm support. Do you need gpu for this transcoding?

 

For cpu, dual xeon might make sense here if you have multiple vms running. There pretty cheap for the performance, and support lots of ram and cards.

 

 

The reason why I use Unraid is its user-friendly UI. Not everyone in the company is familiar with Linux, so with the easy to use Unraid, it will save us a lot of trouble when I am not at the office

[Peter.c]

On 12/23/2018 at 10:49 AM, Salv8 (sam) said:

don't forget you need a network connection that can handle the amount of data that the editors will be using

i would recermend a 1GB connection for each editor (if you want some futureproof-ness get a 10GB nic on the server and connect it up to a switch that has a 1GB connections for each port, the ASUS XG-U2008 is a good example of what i mean switch wise)

One more question, what is the best nic for this network switch? I only found most of the 10G with the sfp+ port, instead of rj45

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Peter.c said:

The reason why I use Unraid is its user-friendly UI. Not everyone in the company is familiar with Linux, so with the easy to use Unraid, it will save us a lot of trouble when I am not at the office

the speed of unraid will limit you thoiugh.

 

id really look into proxmox, it also has a nice web ui and is more powerfull

[Salv8 (sam)]

5 hours ago, Peter.c said:

One more question, what is the best nic for this network switch? I only found most of the 10G with the sfp+ port, instead of rj45

most 10G nic's aren't rj45 since most use sfp+, if worse comes to worse you may have to look on ebay but there are ones that exist, they aren't very populer

but here: https://www.mwave.com.au/product/asus-xgc100c-10gbps-baset-pci-express-network-adapter-ac07997

(fun fact: the LTT boi's use this for their ingest stations!)

if your server manufacturer doesn't provide an option (contact them, i'm sure they can do something if it's still supported) then this will do the job for the server nicely