windows share drive vs NAS

[Elvinc]

I'm debating with myself to either buy a NAS or raid HDD and share it from windows on my network. my network is only Gigabit so i doubt i would be able to get good editing speeds from either solution however would there be a noticeable difference for transfer speeds. my plan is to make 20tb+ raid for my archive. i would be interested in doing an SSD NAS or Shared drive but i don't know if it would be usable for our video editing. I working normally with 1080p footage from a GH4 so nothing too crazy. 

 

[Windows7ge]

I would want to go with a proper NAS solution if you're doing legitimate work on it. To answer the question performance wise you probably wouldn't see any difference at all. The difference would be in the functions & features included in the server software.

 

If you're open to building/setting up your own solution I'd recommend FreeNAS or Debian+ZFS. This would give you a resilient file system and software RAID support. No hardware controller needed.

[Elvinc]

If i upgraded my network where i have me computers, would i see a difference then? if i did a 10 gig network for both the PCs and the NAS?

[Windows7ge]

12 minutes ago, Elvinc said:

If i upgraded my network where i have me computers, would i see a difference then? if i did a 10 gig network for both the PCs and the NAS?

If you stepped up to 10Gbit your next bottle neck would likely be your spinning platters (HDD's) but if you have at least a 3 drive RAID5 or more and an SSD in your desktop it would give you beyond 1Gbit performance (by a little bit).

 

If you're asking if it'd make a difference with a makeshit Windows share NAS or a proper NAS solution you may see a bit more performance with the makeshift NAS just because SAMBA's implementation of the SMB protocol on Linux isn't quite as performant as SMB on Windows. At least not without a lot of tinkering.

 

Realistically though the performance difference shouldn't be night & day. If my options were +50MB/s or even +100MB/s or a better File System that works to detect drive errors and protect the data I'd still use ZFS&Linux but that's up to you. It's your project.

[Elvinc]

thanks man super helpful 

[Windows7ge]

42 minutes ago, Elvinc said:

thanks man super helpful 

Yep.