Discussion: SOHO NAS - Network Video Editing

[chrisprice12]

Hi all,

 

I'm looking to get different people's opinions on this topic. I'll jump right in, here is my dilemma, with some context:

 

I'm looking to expand my storage following a business startup. I'm quickly running out of storage for video files and need to build a NAS. I understand you can buy pre-built, but it's cheaper to go with the former. I am looking to RAID (thinking RAID 10, for speed and redundancy, but I'm open to suggestions) my setup, along with backups. I primarily intend to be working with 1080p, however as 4K is very close to being easily accessible, it won't be long before I upgrade my equipment.

 

Now, the question. 5400RPM, 5900RPM or 7200RPM. Will 7200RPM offer much of a benefit over 5900RPM when working with video on a RAIDed NAS? For arguments sake, take network speed out of the question for now.

 

My problem: I'm after 4x3TB ideally, as a RAID 10 would give me 6TB. Plenty. WD no longer sell Red Pro 3TB drives with 7200RPM, neither do Seagate with their IronWolf Pro's, forcing me to go for the 4TB (which I cannot afford) or 2TB (which wouldn't provide enough storage). This provides me with the only option to go for Seagate IronWolf's, at 5900RPM. Hence my dilemma. I'm on a strict budget of £575.

 

How would this stack up? Anyone got any suggestions on way's to improve this? Different RAID? I'm up for a discussion.

 

Thanks for all your help in advance.

 

Chris

 

Edit: I'm looking to ideally edit directly from this NAS, not store and retrieve when I need. I suppose I could add a scratch disk to it using an SSD and move footage around, but that's a pain.

[Electronics Wizardy]

13 minutes ago, chrisprice12 said:

Now, the question. 5400RPM, 5900RPM or 7200RPM. Will 7200RPM offer much of a benefit over 5900RPM when working with video on a RAIDed NAS? For arguments sake, take network speed out of the question for now.

This really depends on the drives. There is much more to drive speed than rpm and some 5400rpm drives are faster than 7200rpm drives

 

What network speed do you have? Id get 10gb for this, gigabit is gonna be bad.

 

15 minutes ago, chrisprice12 said:

I'm on a strict budget of £575.

Is that drives + nas

 

 

 

With that tight of a budget you would be much better off just putting the drives in your desktop and making a network share if someone else needs to use the storage. Storage spaces works well for this, and id consider adding a ssd tier aswell.

 

Id get bigger drives, Id aim for 8tb and get more as more spaces is needed. Bigger drives are often cheaper per tb, faster, and use less space and heat per tb.

[Mikensan]

Either a solid RAID card or RAID through the O/S + cache (optane?) will negate the slower RPMs (since you're working off single large files, they should get sucked into cache).

 

More drives = faster performance, so smaller and more of them - space permitting - is one more thing to consider.

 

RPM on a SATA disk mainly is going to just impact seek speeds, I would say it has more impact on a SAS drive that supports more channels. Again however, working on single large files, seek time I would imagine - won't matter to you.

 

6TB seems like nothing, considering 1080p RAW footage can easily be up to 50-90gb for just an hour of footage. If this is something you generate money from, I'd consider using a loan (personal or business) to get it right.

[chrisprice12]

On 12/30/2018 at 7:09 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

This really depends on the drives. There is much more to drive speed than rpm and some 5400rpm drives are faster than 7200rpm drives

 

What network speed do you have? Id get 10gb for this, gigabit is gonna be bad.

 

Is that drives + nas

 

 

 

With that tight of a budget you would be much better off just putting the drives in your desktop and making a network share if someone else needs to use the storage. Storage spaces works well for this, and id consider adding a ssd tier aswell.

 

Id get bigger drives, Id aim for 8tb and get more as more spaces is needed. Bigger drives are often cheaper per tb, faster, and use less space and heat per tb.

Thanks for the reply. The office doesn't support 10gb, but I am using NIC teaming with Meraki switches to create a 3gb connection. I went for Seagate IronWolfs in the end as what I had read is that it would be (mostly) only seek times that were affected.

 

Now another dilemma I ran into...I had planned to go mobo RAID, however on further research, people recommend software RAID over mobo. In my eyes, mobo would be better, as if Windows decides to crash (as it often does) it will take any writes with it. At the end of all of this, I'm now looking for a RAID controller just to do it right. Any brands I should stay away from? Things to look out for?

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, chrisprice12 said:

Thanks for the reply. The office doesn't support 10gb, but I am using NIC teaming with Meraki switches to create a 3gb connection. I went for Seagate IronWolfs in the end as what I had read is that it would be (mostly) only seek times that were affected.

 

Now another dilemma I ran into...I had planned to go mobo RAID, however on further research, people recommend software RAID over mobo. In my eyes, mobo would be better, as if Windows decides to crash (as it often does) it will take any writes with it. At the end of all of this, I'm now looking for a RAID controller just to do it right. Any brands I should stay away from? Things to look out for?

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

Are you using windows? If so id use smb multichannel instead of teaming. It will allow >1gb to one pc and works well in places like this.

 

DOn't use motherboard raid, its a fake hardware raid, and still uses the cpu.

 

How often is your system crashing? It really shouldn't crash much(like once a year), otherwise there is a problem.

 

Software raid can handle power failure pretty well, Id use this here, esp with this budget. A raid card will only help you if you have one with a battery, and that won't be cheap.

 

 

Id just use storage spaces in windows here. Add the drives to a windows system, setup storage spaces and you should be good to go.

 

[chrisprice12]

On 1/2/2019 at 7:20 PM, Mikensan said:

Either a solid RAID card or RAID through the O/S + cache (optane?) will negate the slower RPMs (since you're working off single large files, they should get sucked into cache).

 

More drives = faster performance, so smaller and more of them - space permitting - is one more thing to consider.

 

RPM on a SATA disk mainly is going to just impact seek speeds, I would say it has more impact on a SAS drive that supports more channels. Again however, working on single large files, seek time I would imagine - won't matter to you.

 

6TB seems like nothing, considering 1080p RAW footage can easily be up to 50-90gb for just an hour of footage. If this is something you generate money from, I'd consider using a loan (personal or business) to get it right.

Ahh ok I didn't think of it like that. Could always go for 6x2tb then.

 

I won't be working with RAW, prores 422. Will be offloading completed projects too, so I'm hoping 6tb should be OK.

 

Thanks for the advice!

[chrisprice12]

4 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Are you using windows? If so id use smb multichannel instead of teaming. It will allow >1gb to one pc and works well in places like this.

 

DOn't use motherboard raid, its a fake hardware raid, and still uses the cpu.

 

How often is your system crashing? It really shouldn't crash much(like once a year), otherwise there is a problem.

 

Software raid can handle power failure pretty well, Id use this here, esp with this budget. A raid card will only help you if you have one with a battery, and that won't be cheap.

 

 

Id just use storage spaces in windows here. Add the drives to a windows system, setup storage spaces and you should be good to go.

 

Yes server 2019. I'll look into that - I didn't realise there was another way of doing it. Yeah so I ended up purchasing an LSI 9271-8i which I found cheap. Dedicated RAID card with 1gb cache. Optional BBU to add however, so as soon as my budget comes in, I'll grab one of those straight away. 

 

My Windows doesn't crash much, just my poor attempt at a joke.

 

I did take a look at Storage Spaces, however setting up a RAID 10 didn't seem to be an easy task. Thanks for your help on this!

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, chrisprice12 said:

I did take a look at Storage Spaces, however setting up a RAID 10 didn't seem to be an easy task. Thanks for your help on this!

RAID 10 in Storage Spaces is just two-way mirror and having more than 2 disks in the storage pool.

 

The RAID card you got is going to perform better anyway so no big deal.