ASK NC

Dear NasCompares team,

I, first of all, wanted to get a NAS to improve the security of my photos and videos with redundancy and encryption.
Right now, I am stuck with slow external hard drives, so it would be beneficial if the NAS could give me a speed increase for a better workflow.

The main problem I am struggling with right now is the question of how much performance is needed for a semi-professional photo- and videographer.
I would like to edit RAW 50MP photos directly on the system, and, if possible, to do the same with 4k 10Bit 250Mbit videos.
If the video editing part is not feasible with my budget, it would be fine to have a DAS SSD for video editing, in which I could transfer the data.

What kind of NAS do I need for this use case? Do I need 1Gbit, 2,5Gbit or 10Gbit? And could a mixed storage solution help me with having lots of value storage while also being able to edit videos on the NAS?

If needed, I could build a NAS myself.

Thanks for the help,
Jan

For your use case, a high-performance NAS with fast storage options and hardware-accelerated transcoding capabilities would be ideal. The amount of network speed you need depends on the number of clients accessing the NAS at once and the amount of data being transferred.

For editing RAW 50MP photos, you would need a fast storage solution, such as an SSD or NVMe drive, with enough storage capacity to accommodate your needs. Depending on your budget, you could opt for a NAS with multiple bays that support both SSDs and HDDs, allowing you to have a mix of high-performance storage for your photo and video files, as well as large-capacity, low-cost storage for your other data.

For editing 4K 10-bit 250Mbit videos, you would need a NAS with powerful hardware-accelerated transcoding capabilities. This would allow you to edit your videos directly on the NAS without having to transfer the data to a separate editing device. For this, you would need at least a 2.5 Gbps network connection to ensure smooth and fast data transfer.
For a single user you could us Qnap ts-464 or if possible even 472XT series NAS.

I hope this helps.