NAS storage - charity filmmaker

[Enquiries]

Hi Robbie and Eddie, I hope this finds you both well. I've been watching your videos about the Terramaster NAS D8 and D5 and they've been hugely helpful.

I'm a filmmaker and have been working specifically in-house at charities for the past nearly 10 years. I've started at a new charity and setting up a post production workflow from scratch basically.Currently I'm editing off 2TB SSDs and backing up on spare hard drives, and trying to backup on the cloud when I get a chance. But obviously that's an awful and unsafe way to work. So... this is what I'm thinking (maybe getting initial HDDS and SDDs and then building up) -

Terramaster D8 Hybrid DAS - £259.99
WD Red Pro NAS Hard Drive - 8 TB X 2 - (£214.99 each) - £429.98
WD Red SN700 Series 2TB M.2 2280 M-Key PCIe NVMe SSD Drive - £170
TOTAL - £858.98
TOTAL MINUS NVMe SSD - £688.98

I'd love to get your thoughts. Thanks so much.

Cheers,

James

[ed]

Thanks for reaching out, and I'm glad to hear that the videos have been helpful for you!

It looks like you're on the right track with the Terramaster D8 and your storage choices. The Terramaster D8 Hybrid DAS is a solid choice, especially if you're looking for future expandability. Pairing it with WD Red Pro NAS drives is a great call for reliability and long-term use, especially for editing and post-production work. These drives are built for heavy use, so they'll handle the workload well.

Here are a couple of thoughts based on your setup:

Starting with 8TB x 2 is a good way to begin, giving you 16TB total capacity, and you can expand later as needed. Just keep in mind, if you plan to use any RAID configuration for data protection, the available capacity will be less than 16TB.
Adding the WD Red SN700 NVMe SSD for faster caching is optional but could be beneficial for speeding up certain workflows, especially if you’re dealing with large video files. However, if budget is a concern, you can hold off on that for now and still have a solid setup.
At around £700, this is a strong, expandable setup for your needs. You’ll have plenty of room to grow, and it’ll be far safer and more efficient than editing off SSDs and manually backing up on external drives.