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NAS for photo editing? - Enquiries - 02-28-2020
Hi Rob, I have been watching a lot of your videos in the last couple of months and thank you for sharing such good information - it really helps.
I have been using a NAS for about 10 years now (NASDeluxe 7bay, 2700T), to house and store my pretty large collection of movies - mostly 1080p, mkv. Since it has had very poor speeds during the last months, and I can't even watch a 720p movie without stopping the movie about 5 times during the entire movie (and I need to restart my Popcorn hour C200), I thought it was time to get a new NAS. Transcoding the movies sounds nice, but I'm not sure if that is smth for me, as I usually always work from home and in the off chance I am on the road and want to look at a movie, I am in the airplane, so I have no connection to the Internet anyway.
In reading and looking on Youtube, I found that I can also edit straight from the NAS, provided that my Lightroom catalog is on my computer. I have a self-built WIN10 machine with loads of HDD's inside to house my photos and edit them usually off an internal SSD (not M.2 yet, as my PC is about 7 years old). I never thought about putting my images on my NAS, to edit them directly, as I found the speed lacking - but this suddenly became an option.
In my house, I have almost everything wired with cat5e UTP, gigaswitches, an ASUS AC-RT5300, ASUS AC-RT68u and two ASUS AC-RT86u to have enough Wifi coverage in the house - but no 10 Gbe connections or wiring, nor on my PC. I do not have a thunderbolt port in my PC either. My other machine I work off of, is a Dell XPS15 (9550), which does have a thunderbolt, but the machine is so bad for editing, that I'm usually only using it in a pinch, despite it having an M.2 Samsung EVO Plus 1TB SSD and the specs being the best Dell offered at the time of purchase.
Since I am a professional photographer, I want things to run smoothly and would be great to edit off the NAS from both my laptop and my desktop. Next to that, it would be great to share specific folders with clients, so they can download their images too and I can use it during client meetings to show my work, slideshows, etc.
Since I want to futureproof, I would like a NAS with 8 bays, so I have lots of storage going forward. Ideally, I want something fast enough to edit from, that can house my movie collection (and going forward also 4k content). In the future, I might also want to add security cameras outside the house, but I heard that it would not be good to use the same NAS for that, as it would bog down everything?
Although I always thought I would go for Synology (no real reason, just liked the pricepoint and options), I think Qnap has a lot faster performance from what I read, obviously at a much higher price. I had a chat with a Qnap rep, who was suggesting the TVS-873E (8GB) or the TVS-872XT-I5 (15GB). I am not bound to QNAP, I would just like to find the best option for me. I would also go for the biggest affordable HDD's and insert an M.2 SSD.
Not sure about the 10 Gbe connection, or the Thunderbolt - I have been looking for an adapter to USB3.1, as I don't think I can easily get Thunderbolt now (unless I buy a new Mobo, with everything around that). It's usually just me using the NAS, but maybe my girlfriend would want to use it too for viewing pictures and edit Premiere Pro movies of our daughter (though this is limited, certainly not even a weekly operation). If 10 Gb is vital, I can think about upgrading parts of the UTP's and switch in the coming year(s), or can I get to acceptable speeds using linkover from two (or more) cat5e UTP's?
I am paranoid about loosing data, so I have about 5 backups of all my pictures, also off-site and everything is also in a Backblaze account.
Is there something you can recommend or for me to not care about/steer clear of? My current NAS houses about 10 Tb worth of movies and my photo library in my PC is around 15-20 Tb.
Also please make recommendations about the 10 Gbe and Thunderbolt connection.
The TVS872 is over €2.200 and am wondering if it is really that much better (for my needs) or that it is overkill...
Is there an easy way to measure the speed of my current NAS, to see if that really is the bottleneck, not the cables after that? I did a test with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, which showed 14.3 MB/s write and 25.9 MB/s read speed on my desktop pc, which is downstairs, the NAS is housed on the top floor (3 stories).
Thank you in advance.
Best regards,
Robert
NAS for photo editing? - ed - 03-17-2021
If you are worried about data, I would rather suggest Synology. They have just now released a new operating system which speeds things up and makes access more secure. Their software is better for automated backups and it outcompetes services like Dropbox. But in meantime, you cal also back up any part of the NAS to BackBlaze or elsewhere.DS1821+ and DS1821xs are their latest models capable of 10GbE upgrades and even 4K transcoding in many cases.Qnap is more configurable, but you are right, Thunderbolt would never get used to your situation.Also, a faster CPU and multiple LAN will allow you to run surveillance on the same NAS.I hope this helps.