NAS for a small video production company

DieselWeasel · December 20, 2019

Hi,

I'm searching for the right Synology NAS solution for our company. Right now we have 2-3 editors working at once, but we are looking to have the capacity for 5.

Usually we work from internal disks or, if the project is bigger, we work straight from external LaCie drives and after the project is finished we back up to our Synology. But we would like to switch to having storage fast enough to work directly off of it, without having to copy footage from one place to another.

I've looked through the products but I still have a lot of questions...

- Performance tests for all products are mostly done with fully loaded SSD configurations. What is performance like with HDDs? (Something like Ironwolf pro)

-Some lower end products only have one pcie slot without any other option for m.2 ssd. In our configuration we would absolutely need 10Gbs ethernet (maybe even 40Gbs between the switch and NAS?) but I've noticed that most NAS solutions only offer NVMe ssd caching with pcie cards. How much does ssd caching boost transfer speeds? Should we use the biggest SSDs we can find or does the capacity not matter that much (does is depend on the size of the array)?

-How does more RAM effect transfer speeds or do we just need more RAM to support a bigger array?

- If we get something like the RS1619xs+ and fill it with ssds and get the expansion bay with HDDs what are the speeds like ? Can you create a single pool from both? Can one pool work as caching for another ? I presume the expansion bays don’t have any logic, so if the RS1619xs+ dies you don’t have any storage?

- if we get a 16 bay unit and fill it up with only 8 drives what would be the speed difference compared to a full loud-out

I think I had more questions but I’ve forgotten them as I started writing Looking forward to your replies and I’ll get more questions then.

leadeater · December 20, 2019

You don't need 40Gbps, it's also not too likely you will ever need that, not unless you're working with raw 8k video or something. The reason SSDs are used over HDDs isn't the throughput it's the IOPs, which is what actually matters.

Maybe also have a look at ProMax or other vendors who do storage systems for video and photo editing specifically.

4 hours ago, DieselWeasel said:

Should we use the biggest SSDs we can find or does the capacity not matter that much (does is depend on the size of the array)?

Balance. Larger SSDs have better wear life but using less larger ones has a high upgrade cost later and also may reduce your performance, realistically SSDs are fast enough that won't matter.

4 hours ago, DieselWeasel said:

if we get a 16 bay unit and fill it up with only 8 drives what would be the speed difference compared to a full loud-out

Using SSDs no difference you will see using it, HDDs then 8 will struggle to do what you need.

4 hours ago, DieselWeasel said:

so if the RS1619xs+ dies you don’t have any storage?

Correct.

4 hours ago, DieselWeasel said:

Can you create a single pool from both? Can one pool work as caching for another ?

I don't use Synology a lot but if they support tiering or caching then you can, which Synology does but not all models. The one you're looking at does support SSD caching but only using the M.2 slots not the main disk bays, https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/genericssdcache.

I probably would advise to not use caching anyway, it can be not as performance reliable as you'd expect so you're likely better off putting SSDs in the main chassis and HDDs in the expansion then creating two separate pools and move completed projects from the SSD pool to the HDD pool.