Need help with NAS Setup for a commercial production house

hellblazer1999 · April 19, 2021

Hey guys

I'm looking to set up a NAS at my current ad production house. Currently, we get new hard disks for every project and take backups on bigger hard disks. But we've run into issues with hard disks failing and sometimes losing the backup too. It's hard for tracking down specific files even with monthly logging of hard disks. I'd like to setup a proper file management system.

A little bit about our current setup:
All the editors work on Windows workstations
Currently on 1 gig ethernet. We'd like to upgrade that too.
We mainly have footage coming in 8k,6k, and 4k from Red, Blackmagic, and Sony cameras. They all come in HFS formatted drives. We use Paragon software to read them on our PC. They are copied to two hard disks and a cloud backup is also made. Then we have the project folder with all assets. Sometimes we have heavy VFX projects that fill up the disks pretty fast.
We edit on Premiere with proxies and have the footage graded on Resolve.
Final files and sent to the client and then the whole thing get backed up into a bigger hard disk. I know it's not the most efficient system but that's what we have now.

Could you guys help us pick a NAS system based on requirements for a studio. There would probably be up the 10 editors working off of the server at a time. How much storage would you suggest having? Most projects come up to 2 to 3tb including raw files. We copy files to internal SSD to edit when the projects are smaller. I need a solution where we could directly edit from the server.

It would be a lot easier to set up if its off the shelf. Don't mind building it either if it's cost effective.

In the recent LMG studio tour, Linus showed a a machine for ingesting alone and the editors accessing files from there to edit. If someone could provide me more information about this or any similar setup, it would be really helpful. Also anything else you guys would want me to look up and learn because I'm a newbie. Let me know if you need any other information from my side and give a few setup suggestions to improve our work flow. I'll pitch the same to my reporting officer.

Thank you.

GDRRiley · April 19, 2021

45 drives, XL60 is the way to start.
last I looked 14tb Toshiba were the sweet spot which with a full server running 4 3 disk fail over stripped, would be about 600TB
your going to want likely something similar to CRS326-24S+2Q+RM for a switch with the 40gb up-link with a bunch of 10gb client ports

komar · April 19, 2021

Pretty much all of your questions have been answered in videos made by LTT.

I blame the clickbaity thumbnails and sometimes very poor choices of titles for not finding that 1 video of Edzel explaining their video editing process from start to finish (it was a laptop review if I remember correctly) so if anybody can link it that would be great a start for the Author to start "researching".

All the server information + tutorials how to set them up are in their server room/server updates vlogs/videos.

You have everything but you gotta dig through years of daily uploads.

hellblazer1999 · April 20, 2021

20 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

45 drives, XL60 is the way to start.
last I looked 14tb Toshiba were the sweet spot which with a full server running 4 3 disk fail over stripped, would be about 600TB
your going to want likely something similar to CRS326-24S+2Q+RM for a switch with the 40gb up-link with a bunch of 10gb client ports

Thank you. I'll look these up. I can continue on the same thread if I have additional questions right?

hellblazer1999 · April 20, 2021

20 hours ago, komar said:

Pretty much all of your questions have been answered in videos made by LTT.

I blame the clickbaity thumbnails and sometimes very poor choices of titles for not finding that 1 video of Edzel explaining their video editing process from start to finish (it was a laptop review if I remember correctly) so if anybody can link it that would be great a start for the Author to start "researching".

All the server information + tutorials how to set them up are in their server room/server updates vlogs/videos.

You have everything but you gotta dig through years of daily uploads.

Thank you for the reply. Yeah I'm sure I've watched few of them over the years. I'll go back and look up for more videos. If anyone here has the link to the video he specified or a playlist maybe (if that's not a lot to ask for) That'd be really helpful.