New NAS Purchase Questions Regarding Speed ?

[Enquiries]

Hi, I make deepfake videos. My 3 computers have different abilities and I loved the idea of accessing the deepfakes from a central NAS drive and being able to start training on computer A, stop it from training, and finish it up on computer C because it had a better GPU and on the last step of making a deepfake video it does require more VRAM to process everything the way I like. After watching some comparisons online I went with the DS920+. I put 3 10TB WD Red drives in it. Works great. I mapped the drive as drive Z and I am currently able to train 3 deepfakes from the 3 different computers simultaneously. I tried to find out if speed would be sufficient ahead of time, but with all the variables involved coupled with the fact that there aren't that many people that do simultaneous deepfakes off a NAS, I didn't have the best results getting info. So, I went with the one I have and it does work decently. However, it's way slower than a local hard drive and I'd like to get a 2nd NAS if it's possible it will work much more efficiently. The 920 honestly isn't horrible. It's just noticeably slower. Once the software loads the model it trains at the same speed as a local hard drive. But starting the software, loading the models, when it does backups or when it needs to access things, it's probably 4-5 times slower, and there is a lot more waiting. So would a 10 gbit network solution improve this? Or is the WD Red platter drives that are the bottleneck here?

One other thing that isn't as big of a factor, but wanted to verify this... when transferring the deepfake ingredients to the NAS. The source folder and destination folder both contain thousands of 512x512 images. Probably between 10-20k images. They're small.... Someone told me that windows file handling is really crappy for copying thousands of small files like that and it will bottleneck and not be any faster even if I do upgrade to 10gbit or get SSD drives for the new NAS. Because we transferred them to the NAS on a test and it didn't even get close to 1 gbit speeds during those transfers. Bigger files transferred much quicker. But I'm guessing he's right in saying that when moving those thousands of images, it doesn't matter what config I have, it's going to remain at the speed it's at now because of windows file handling?
That being said/asked... The transferring isn't as big of a deal as all the hang ups when starting training, installing the software, loading of the model and source/destination files before it trains and just waiting for it to start processes. Sorry this was so long, but I wanted to attempt to not leave any pertinent info out.

Given all that (assuming you made it through the entire message here haha) do you think upgrading to SSD or 10Gbit would improve things very noticeably? So it would be more like using a local hard drive? Thanks!!!

[ed]

There is a truth in both aspects. Mainly you get a slowdown because of a 1GbE connection. If you would connect a 5Gbit USB adapter this would speed things up.But secondly, Celeron CPU is will struggle with fast data transfer s of small-sized files. Each file needs to be converted into packets for the transfer over the Ethernet. This takes a lot of computing power to deal with numerous files.DS1621+ and DS1621xs+ would feature a faster CPU and 10GbE (PCIe upgrade). This would certainly speed things up in your situation.I hope this helps.