Video Editing NAS Help

[alex2928]

Just watched LTT's budget 4K video editing NAS build and I'm hoping I can get some help regarding a few things. I am running out of space on my local storage and want to deploy something for storage and online video editing, primarily for raw video (blackmagic 12:1, R3D 12:1, data rates 90 - 150 MB/s depending on frame rate). I am currently the only one who will be using it and do have a 10 Gb network in place.

 

Hardware:

• 4790k i7
• 32GB DDR3 RAM
• Gigabyte Ultra Durable MB
• Aquantia 10G NIC
• Ebay HBAs
• 10X Seagate Ironwolf 10TB disks
• 2X 256 GB SSDs

 

My biggest concern is UnRAID. I don't necessarily care about the write penalty, but will care if my reads aren't at least in the 250 MB/s range. It looked like Linus was getting solid numbers in the video, but I think there's a gotcha... Am I correct in assuming that, since UnRAID doesn't stripe data, it's likely that the 300-350 MB/s Linus was seeing was because two clients were pulling off of two separate drives (150-200 MB/s per drive x 2)? In my case I'm the only client, so I don't really want to build something that just ends up performing like a massive capacity single spinning disk. Am I missing something regarding unRAID read performance? 

 

The other popular alternative I'm seeing others recommend is FreeNAS, but Linus' comments in the video about bad FreeNAS experiences have me worried. I've never deployed a FreeNAS system and need to depend on whatever solution I come up with, as this is for my freelance work. I would also need to buy a new MB, CPU, and RAM to support ECC.... Does anyone have experience deploying a ZFS based system who can give me some pointers? If I do go with ZFS, I could make 3 Raidz1 vdevs and have a hot spare, and that way if I want to expand I'd just need to buy 3 additional drives (...right?)

 

To me it seems like the LTT video was targeted at a VERY niche demographic: people who shoot on very consumer-grade cameras, have multiple editors, and need insane amounts of storage. I'm a single-user editing prosumer/pro level footage, and need a fair amount of space. 

 

Does it even make sense for me to build a NAS as opposed to just buying a fatty thunderbolt 3 raid enclosure? Or just raiding like 5 2TB SSDs to edit each project on and building an UnRAID box as archival storage?

 

Sorry for the long post, just hoping someone here has experience with a similar use-case! 

[Windows7ge]

I can't comment on UnRAID but based off what I understand writes would be affected in that way. I don't know if UnRAID has a RAM cache for speeding up reads of frequent files. If not then I think you're screwed unless you setup an SSD as a cache.

 

ECC is a recommended for ZFS it's not a requirement.

 

FreeNAS is nice but it has it's drawbacks (it's hypervisor is terrible for one). You do have to understand though that Linus is human like anybody else. Just because it didn't work for him doesn't mean it won't work for you.

 

With ZFS you append vdevs. The data will be striped across them so you want each vdev to have it's own redundancy. If you made a 3 way 3 drive raidz1 then your best option would be to append 3 disks in a raidz1 to expand the pool at a time.

 

If you need or expect that you will need 100TB of storage that in itself justifies having a File Server and a good supporting File System. It also gives you the flexibility for a lot more functionality in the future. NAS units from Synology and QNAP are very purpose built.

[seagate_surfer]

4 hours ago, alex2928 said:

-snip-

What would that video be? Share the link please.

[alex2928]

3 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

What would that video be? Share the link please.

 

[alex2928]

7 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

...

Thank you for the reply. 

 

I certainly like the idea of having a dedicated file server for everything. I'm not as concerned with VMs so FreeNAS may very well be the option to go with. I'd rather stay away from synology or QNAP units after my experiences with them before. 

 

I guess I need to decide if the increased cost for ECC ram is worth it. Since this is a box that will contain everything I'd like to minimize risk (I have a backup solution but it would take days to retrieve my data). 

 

I'll keep researching!

[Jarsky]

8 hours ago, alex2928 said:

My biggest concern is UnRAID. I don't necessarily care about the write penalty, but will care if my reads aren't at least in the 250 MB/s range. It looked like Linus was getting solid numbers in the video, but I think there's a gotcha... Am I correct in assuming that, since UnRAID doesn't stripe data, it's likely that the 300-350 MB/s Linus was seeing was because two clients were pulling off of two separate drives (150-200 MB/s per drive x 2)? In my case I'm the only client, so I don't really want to build something that just ends up performing like a massive capacity single spinning disk. Am I missing something regarding unRAID read performance? 

 

Theres 4 ways to approach it. 

 

• UnRAID by default employs what it calls "High Water" for its array configuration. If youre going to be working with multiple files, then ideally you want to use their "Most Free" configuration so it staggers your files. But each file is on only 1 disk, so you can only read a single file from a single disk...so if you're working with a single large raw video file of 50GB for example, you could only scrub thorugh it at the hard disks speed (150-200MB/s for sequential on a healthy SATA disk). 
• The next would be to setup a share on the cache drive and edit it off the cache disk which would give you SSD speed, however it wouldn't be protected by your parity protection if this is your only copy...effectively you'd probably want to save 2 copies, 1 to array, 1 to cache share. 
• You can use "Unallocated disks" with a set of NVMe drives to setup a ZFS Mirror using the ZFS Plugin. Then utilize it in the same way as you would on the SSD cache, but because you configured it in a mirror it would be protected for a 1 disk failure. You'd have to copy the data manually (or have a script) to your storage array. 
• If you're really set on using UnRAID, you can assign a single disk to the UnRAID Array (you need at least 1 disk to initialize the array which enables all the other UnRAID functions), and then build your main storage with "Unallocated disks" using ZFS and create a big RAIDZ-2, and assign an NVMe cache to it. That will give you all the power of UnRAID's VM/Docker support, but with robustness and overall performance increase of ZFS. It is a more complex configuration and does require you manually defining your SAMBA configuration. 

 

8 hours ago, alex2928 said:

The other popular alternative I'm seeing others recommend is FreeNAS, but Linus' comments in the video about bad FreeNAS experiences have me worried. I've never deployed a FreeNAS system and need to depend on whatever solution I come up with, as this is for my freelance work. I would also need to buy a new MB, CPU, and RAM to support ECC.... Does anyone have experience deploying a ZFS based system who can give me some pointers? If I do go with ZFS, I could make 3 Raidz1 vdevs and have a hot spare, and that way if I want to expand I'd just need to buy 3 additional drives (...right?)

I've had great experiences with FreeNAS. Most of Linus' experience with FreeNAS I believe is from v9, its now on v11 which is pretty powerful, especially for those of us that deal with Virtualization, its VMware integration and iSCSi support is fantastic. But for someone that just wants storage, its a strong contender as well, basically everything can be done via the GUI and not much need to mess about in terminal. You don't need ECC for ZFS, its just recommended....the actual chance of a bit flipping in flight is extremely low. 

 

As far as your configuration it depends on the risk you're willing to take. 

3 RAIDZ-1 vdev's means you can only have 1 disk fail in either of those 3 vdev's...a second disk failure you would lose 1/3 of your total pools data. 

If you made 2 RAIDZ-2 vdev's then you can have 2 disks fail in either....but it does mean you'd have to expand by 5 disks at a time.

 

8 hours ago, alex2928 said:

To me it seems like the LTT video was targeted at a VERY niche demographic: people who shoot on very consumer-grade cameras, have multiple editors, and need insane amounts of storage. I'm a single-user editing prosumer/pro level footage, and need a fair amount of space. 

I think typically the idea is, if you're working by yourself you probably would generally only use the NAS for backing up your footage. You'd do editing locally on your PC/Mac. Most I know work this way which includes some friends that work as videographers and for media companies but do their own projects on the side. 

 

8 hours ago, alex2928 said:

Does it even make sense for me to build a NAS as opposed to just buying a fatty thunderbolt 3 raid enclosure? Or just raiding like 5 2TB SSDs to edit each project on and building an UnRAID box as archival storage?

Hopefully someone with more experience in this area can chime in. I don't know anyone that does external RAID for editing. Most I know dont need 10TB of working space, their video projects are generally a max of a couple hundred GB's so they edit on their SSD/NVMe and store on a hard disk, and use NAS for archiving. 

[Windows7ge]

9 hours ago, alex2928 said:

I guess I need to decide if the increased cost for ECC ram is worth it. Since this is a box that will contain everything I'd like to minimize risk (I have a backup solution but it would take days to retrieve my data).

Depending on where you look ECC doesn't cost much or any more than desktop non-ecc memory. You can find DDR4 ECC UDIMM memory for <$40/8GB stick. That's about on par with desktop DDR4.