I think im looking for a NAS but not sure, I have an archive path that works to a thunder blade X8 and then gets backed up over thunderbolt to a 192TB raid - which then gets backed up to LTO9. anyhow im about to embark on a bigger job that will have a few machines accessing the same sort of project clips and things (not just for flame for everything else too) NAS over 10gig seems to be the answer. if so. whats the best one (on a budget ish) I already have the 10gig network. I was looking at the Ugreen solutions. im thinking 48Tb sort of thing. I would also arrive and backup all machine over night to this same central storage.
Not sure there is a simple answer, as there are many options to choose from.
Some of the parameters are whether you want to buy off the shelf or build a TrueNAS server. What are the expansion options over time, do you stop at 10GbE or keep headroom. What the minimum performance? SMB vs NFS.
It may be best to have a conversation with someone you talk all this through in detail, more than this post will illuminate.
I’m happy with my 8yr old Synology. Served me well, but that might not be an equally good fit for others.
I have two Flames and a Windows-based workstations with NVME storage doing nightly archives of selected projects via 10Gb (Fiber) with an inexpensive QNap switch to a Synology 1819+ NAS with 8 Hard Drives (spinning iron). The NAS then archives selects to external hard drives as necessary for delivery.
The Synology has proven to be a reliable, cost-effective NAS that has run perfectly for me for over five years. While it wouldn’t be good for any type of real-time guaranteed playback, it’s perfect as a centralized hub for this type of workflow. They can scale, but I don’t think the smaller systems (such as mine) would be good for multiple workstation sharing large dataflows at once. I manage that by making a lot of the NAS operation ‘sequential’, i.e. Backup to the NAS, then make any clones, then archive to hard drives, etc. I’m sure you could do a lot more work in parallel if you used SSDs instead of HDs, but for me the cost savings was worth the decreased speed.
I like TrueNAS and some of the other robust NAS devices out there, but in my current setup this is perfect a I don’t have any time for management. The Synology in a closed environment is pretty straightforward. I’ve never tried to connect a tape drive directly into it–only via 10 GB connection to an external PC.
One quick thing to flag - something that happens with my Synology, and I heard from others as well. Actually not Synology’s fault but rather Apple’s drama cycle. Under heavy use the Synology will disconnect from the Mac.
Usually would happen if I have footage on NAS and render back to NAS (so read+write). Then render fails because NAS disconnects temporarily.
I’ve looked into it, and it has something to do with instability in Apple’s SMB stack. Doesn’t happen from Linux. There are some things to tweak, but doesn’t seem to help. Also hasn’t been a problem in the past, but only more recent MacOS releases.
Two work-arounds. Read footage from NAS, but render to another drive (generally a good idea anyway to never read/write from the same spinning drives). Or cache the footage in Flame onto local NVME and render back to NAS. The latter is a good strategy anyway. Leave the main copy of your footage on the NAS and create temp cache copies while working. Flame makes that very easy. Can be done for other apps with a bit of help of a sync tool. Keep file life cycle nice and tidy.
The other option is to use NFS, but doing that on Apple is it’s own drama cycle too.
im not going to render to this ive got two X12s locally on all machines for cache and local storage. this is for archives /backups and central storage of footage for people to draw down. any one used the Ugreen ones? theyre cheaper.
The exact same thing happened to me this morning…
@allklier I’ve also heard that about disconnects. I use only SMB and fiber and I’ve never had a disconnect from the Synology, even during multi-day transfers and mild simultaneous copies. I can’t speak for heavy, multi-user access with Hard Disks.
I will say that 8 spinning irons slows down quickly during simultaneous access. But the BTFS has been solid as a rock and never lost a drive in 7 years, even with upgrading some drives over time (which is a bit of a sluggish process, to be sure).