ZFS Freenas Vs Unraid for Video Editor

[JoshuaRossChristie]

Which one for a home server for video editing storage?

[WereCatf]

2 minutes ago, JoshuaRossChristie said:

Which one for a home server for video editing storage?

Depends entirely on the hardware you're planning to use. Unraid doesn't use a RAID, so you're either limited to the speed of whatever cache-disk you use or, if you don't use a cache-disk at all, the underlying drive that you're writing to. FreeNAS can RAID the drives and you can also use a cache-drive as well. This is to say, if you use a fast cache-drive, it doesn't really matter which one you use, as long as you use a large SSD for cache. How big and how fast? That depends on the size of your video-projects, I cannot answer that one for you.

[Windows7ge]

15 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

FreeNAS can RAID the drives and you can also use a cache-drive as well. This is to say, if you use a fast cache-drive, it doesn't really matter which one you use, as long as you use a large SSD for cache.

Based on all of my own research if you are referring to a ZIL or SLOG this will not accelerate write operations. This is a safety net in the event of power failure during a write operation to the pool. Using protocols such as SMB which are asynchronous a ZIL which only works with synchronous operations it will not work to cache any data in the same fashion used by UNRAID (to speed up file transfers). 

 

The only effective write cache ZFS has in context of a NAS based application is system RAM. You can assign a L2ARC device if there isn't much RAM but the write performance will be much worse.

 

45Drives covers the topic quite well: ZFS Caching

[Maticks]

I am the biggest advocate for Unraid but video editing is something the system not really design for. the only likely way you can do it is with the new Cache Pool system and drop a heap of SSD's into that Poll then use the standard Hard Drives for Archive pool of the footage to push too later.

Offloading it down from SSD Video editing to Archival, you access it at a decent Read Speed Archived but you won't be editing it and writing at a decent speed there.

 

FreeNas is going to give you that performance all the time, you will need a budget to buy all the same size drives is all but you will maintain high performance read and write always.