Video Editng NAS for 2 Editors AsusTor or QNAP?

[TobiasDax]

So, i have a small video based Startup and we are taking on new Editors soon.

This means that storing all our RAW footage on my personal UNRAID Server won't be enough anymore and i have to level up the gear

My Requirements:
Two Editors will be accessing the NAS locally at the same time

We will most likely generate 30-40TB of footage in the next year (based on the 32TB we generated with half the people in the last two years)

Editing could be done with Proxy Media, but currently the proxys live next to the raw files on my server, so still access speed is an issue.

We are working with Davinci Reoslve, so no Adobe only solutions

I will also onboard a third Editor on a different location, so ideally the third editor will just get the same NAS and both will be mirrored.

Both NAS devices will backup everything to an UNRAID server on a different location for a real backup.

My current Issues:

UNRAID as a storage solution is quite slow if stuff is stored on the Array, i am connected via 10GB direct and still read/ write is around 80mb/s.

For my own sake i have synced my working directorys to my local machine. This is a manual process, and leads to a lot of problems down the line, so i would like to avoid that.

Since i am also using the UNRAID Server for personal media, backups and projects i would feel a lot saver if i would not host critical company data for any longer than i have to

 

 

I am currently looking at these Options:

Asustor Lockerstor 10 AS6510T
10 Bays + 2 NVMe, Dual 10GB + Dual 2.5GB Ethernet

1250€

Would likely need a RAM upgrade (comes with only 8GB)

I have never worked with an Asustor Nas and don't know how robust their ecosystem/ software is.
But form the spec sheet it looks like it would do the job quite fine.

Would love to know how good the automatic caching works for video editing, i have no experience with that at all

 

QNAP TVS-h1288X
This seems way overpowered for what i need, but also seems to be the only reasonable solution form QNAP with that many Drive Bays

8 + 4 Bays (3,5 + 2,5) + 2 NVMe, Dual 10GB + Quad 2,5GB Ethernet

4000€

This is way to expensive for my taste, but i am willing to listen if you all tell me that the Austor lineup is way worse.

 

Synology is moving to forcing their own HDDs which i don't like that much, so they are out for now.

 

Storage:
I would currently buy 12TB Ironwolf Pro drives for any solution, the way i understand it with both QNAP and Austor it is possible to start with a few drives and add to them down the road.

I think RAID 5 should be fine since all Data will be stored on 2 other locations as well.

Do any of you have experiences with these NAS systems? Do you recommend something elese for my needs?

Would be glad to hear from a few reasonable voices

[DrMacintosh]

2 hours ago, TobiasDax said:

We will most likely generate 30-40TB of footage in the next year

Seriously, start looking into an LTO archive solution. Generating this much data, at this rate, is unsustainable. With this much data, you're going beyond what an off the shelf NAS can do for you and should start looking at something like a storinator from 45 drives. Even with 10 bays full of 12TB drives, not even factoring in RAID storage loss, that is only 120TB. That only gets you 3 years before you have to do this whole song and dance again. Not a wise use of money imo.

 

 

 

2 hours ago, TobiasDax said:

Synology is moving to forcing their own HDDs

 

They are absolutely not doing that. They are releasing new drives, and their more enterprise products are certified to work with them, but any WD or SGT NAS drive will work without issue. 

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, TobiasDax said:

QNAP TVS-h1288X
This seems way overpowered for what i need, but also seems to be the only reasonable solution form QNAP with that many Drive Bays

Is it just the 8 3.5" HDD bays that lead you to this option?

[10leej]

So

6 hours ago, TobiasDax said:

I would currently buy 12TB Ironwolf Pro drives

If your editing you want SSDs for the working edits and only use HDD's for archive.

 

Unless you buy a massive amount of HDD's and pair them together via RAID 0 or 10 (I would not use RAID 5 or 6 for editing storage only) you'll get better performace per disk from a SSD so i would recommend actually using a mix.

SSD's for the share your using for editing

HDD's for archive

 

Then for the comment on backups (because you should have a backup plan):

4 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

Seriously, start looking into an LTO archive solution. Generating this much data, at this rate, is unsustainable. With this much data, you're going beyond what an off the shelf NAS can do for you and should start looking at something like a storinator from 45 drives. Even with 10 bays full of 12TB drives, not even factoring in RAID storage loss, that is only 120TB. That only gets you 3 years before you have to do this whole song and dance again. Not a wise use of money imo.

I second this,HOWEVER OP needs to implement a 3-2-1 backup plan since this is critical data (customer data).

[TobiasDax]

8 hours ago, 10leej said:

So

If your editing you want SSDs for the working edits and only use HDD's for archive.

 

Unless you buy a massive amount of HDD's and pair them together via RAID 0 or 10 (I would not use RAID 5 or 6 for editing storage only) you'll get better performace per disk from a SSD so i would recommend actually using a mix.

SSD's for the share your using for editing

HDD's for archive

 

Then for the comment on backups (because you should have a backup plan):

I second this,HOWEVER OP needs to implement a 3-2-1 backup plan since this is critical data (customer data).

Yeah the mix of HDDs and NVMe is why the two NAS solutions seem so great. As far as i understood it through a bunch of video reviews they are quite good at caching the recently accessed files on the nvme drives where i would get the performance from.

In an ideal world i would look into an all ssd nas, but to be honest we dont have that kind of cash around at the moment

I am currently editing of my UNRAID server, which is doable for one person while using proxy files, so even a hdd nas with auto caching should be a big improvement.

 

 

12 hours ago, leadeater said:

Is it just the 8 3.5" HDD bays that lead you to this option?

Yes, and the 4 SSD bays for ssd caching. There is a smaller one with 5bays and 4 ssd bays, but that will run out of storage quite soon i guess.

 

 

12 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

Seriously, start looking into an LTO archive solution. Generating this much data, at this rate, is unsustainable. With this much data, you're going beyond what an off the shelf NAS can do for you and should start looking at something like a storinator from 45 drives. Even with 10 bays full of 12TB drives, not even factoring in RAID storage loss, that is only 120TB. That only gets you 3 years before you have to do this whole song and dance again. Not a wise use of money imo.

 

 

 

 

They are absolutely not doing that. They are releasing new drives, and their more enterprise products are certified to work with them, but any WD or SGT NAS drive will work without issue. 

Good to know about the synology thing, might have gotten some reviews mixed up.

 

LTO is a good suggestion for long term storage, thanks for the hint, i will look into that for sure.

I had only thought about the unraid server for that, and with the price of LTO drives it will be quite some time to reach a break even point.
Still might be somthing we go for for long term archival, but we will see

 

The NASs are for the currently needed Data...since we are quite young as a company i am not sure how often we will have to reach back over a year in the future. At the moment i am regularly accessing older material form the last 12 Months, so i wanted a solution capable of storing this timeframe on site.

 

 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, TobiasDax said:

Yes, and the 4 SSD bays for ssd caching. There is a smaller one with 5bays and 4 ssd bays, but that will run out of storage quite soon i guess.

If there is a more price appealing option from QNAP with a good CPU and 4 SSDs bays you can add on an expansion unit so you don't have to look for one that has a lot of HDD bays.

https://www.qnap.com/en/product/series/expansion

So long as the expansion  bays are reasonably priced of course. I really like QNAP a lot and typically at the same price point you get a better CPU than Synology, that may not be true today though.

[TobiasDax]

8 hours ago, leadeater said:

If there is a more price appealing option from QNAP with a good CPU and 4 SSDs bays you can add on an expansion unit so you don't have to look for one that has a lot of HDD bays.

https://www.qnap.com/en/product/series/expansion

So long as the expansion  bays are reasonably priced of course. I really like QNAP a lot and typically at the same price point you get a better CPU than Synology, that may not be true today though.

yeah, using less bays and extensions was also my idea at first, but at least for the asustor systemsthe smaller ones (below 8) don't come with 10GB ethernet.

It can be added with an pcie card, but then i will loose 2 nvme slots and it will cost as much as the bigger nas out of the box

So i guess i will be going with the 8Bay Asustor solution and add an extension box if we get that far

The tape storage is a nice idea, but a quick calculation showed that i would need to buy more than 15 12TB drives before it would be cheaper to get a tape storage reader.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, TobiasDax said:

The tape storage is a nice idea, but a quick calculation showed that i would need to buy more than 15 12TB drives before it would be cheaper to get a tape storage reader.

Tape in small scale is actually expensive and not really practical. If you aren't writing out multiple tapes every month then it's rarely worth it.