I run a small 3D animation studio, currently everyone is working remotely which is hard as it relies so much on my staffs own internet connection.
I need some advice on storage as we're running a Qnap TVS-871T on raid 5 over 10GBe. its been great and have changed only a few drives in warranty, but we now only have 4TB left of the 20TB. So looking at upgrading and maybe to a rackmount version. Had a silly quote from Promax for and SSD build that was £16k and don't think its worth it. Also looked at the Qnap TS-832XU-4G which has potential. We only read/write and use it as storage, we don't render or use any other aspects of the NAS. Would love to know a good way to backup to the cloud or at least offsite to my house for that extra security.
Thanks again for your help its really appreciated.

Hello!

I hope everything's going well in your neck of the woods.

I'm trying to figure out a solution for a local network-accessible server to store our video files on and edit from.

We generate around 100GB of source footage per week, and need to store it locally and edit off of the server. This isn't super-high bitrate (around 10Mbit) but I'd like 2 editors to be able to work off the server at the same time.

We need some fail protection, but this data will be backed up offsite once a week.

We have a local 10Gbit network wiring in place, but haven't yet purchased a 10Gbit switch + 10Gbit pci cards for the machines. They're currently running 2.5Gbit.

We have a 25U rack that has around 20U of capacity.

I was torn between a synology solution (something like the rs3618xs) and rolling our own.

For our own here's the parts list I figured out:
- Arista 7050T-64 (48 port 10Gbit switch w/ some 40Gbps connections available)
- Gen 8 server to run unraid / freenas (don't know what components to use, guessed a dual 8core and 128GB ram and host bus adapter that can pump 40Gbps)
- Netapp DS4246 24 bay HDD encolsure w/ psu and network

But I'm not an IT guy, and I'm not sure what to throw in the server, how to set it up, etc.

For the synology we'd do the rs3618 (I think) and add the 10Gbit pci card, but I'm not sure if we can install the nvme caching layer to keep everything speedy.

Unsure what drives to put in, but we were looking at WD red pro 12TB.

Additionally, if we did the build-our-own approach I don't think we want to buy 24 drives at once, so I was hoping we could buy 4 or 6 at a time and slowly add clusters to the entire system. With a 12-bay system we'd just buy all the drives at once.

Thanks for providing this service!

Hello, could you please tell me if QNA-UC5G1T can upgrade a AS5304T nas to 5gb lan?

Discuss: Understanding Routers, Switches, the Internet and Network Hardware

I have some questions relating to drive expansion on SHR/BTrFS, QTS/Ext4 and QTS-hero/ZFS. On each of these combinations, ...

(1) Can you begin with 1 drive without being locked into JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 5?
(2) Can you begin with RAID 1, and later, easily change/expand to RAID 5?
(3) Can four drives set up as two RAID 1 pairs be easily expanded to a 4-drive RAID 5?
(4) I know that SHR/BTrFS allows expansion with larger drives without loosing their capacity. Can either of the others do this?
(5) In each of the combinations, if an additional drive is added to a RAID 5, can the data be evenly distributed over the whole RAID? ...easily?

Thank you in advance for the assistance.

Hi,

I'm a big fan of your site and there's so much great information. I'm looking for some help, I tried buying the QNAP 251D, but they're sold out everywhere with backorders going all the way to August and any other sellers are just purely price gouging. I'm not a hardcore NAS user, just want to upgrade and have more features to not rely on Cloud services anymore, upgradability in ram and network cards, and based on your videos, seems that QNAP is the way to go.

I like how you And I've watched some of your videos comparing 251D vs TS-253BE and was hoping you can shed some light if you can't find the 251D, what would be your second best alternative? comparable in 2 bay.

Thank you in advance!

What is Synology VPN Plus and Why are Free Licenses a Good Thing?
In response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have adopted work from home policies. Synology's wireless routers featu

Hi, Hope you’re doing well and staying safe. I’m a part time photographer and also getting into video. I’m using a Seagate 5tb hard drive and getting to the point of filing it up-mostly all photos with some video although I do hope to start doing more video. I have had Dobos and have a 5N but now that I haven’t hooked back up simply because I made the mistake of using part of it as back up for Time Machine and now I’m using a windows machine. I’m looking at the Synology since I have a friend who swears by them and tells me to get rid of the Drobo. I’ve just had time to go through all my pictures and organize them properly with all this time at home lately and want to move forward with a solid platform. It would be nice to be able to have multiple computers access as well as possibly stream videos to a tv at some point.
Cheers!
Robert

Hello,

Regarding the following article (https://nascompares.com/2019/03/12/best-10gbe-upgrade-card-of-2019-for-nas/, are any of these cards compatible with ESXi? except the synology one I guess.

As you understand, I want to hook one Synology and one or more ESXi servers on a 10GBe network. ESXi which I use usually 6.5 or 6.7 and I use only stock images (Dell, HP, Cisco etc).
Searching on the VMware forums, didn't bring me any luck. I am looking forward to buy some NICs.

Please do keep up the good job.

Thank you so much.

Discuss: 2.5GBE and 5Gbe NAS Explained