Best solution for small company

[Enquiries]

Hi Guys!

First of all - thank you so much for all your effort and work that you put in sharing knowledge about all things related to NAS. You really did tremendous job but you probably heard that already!

After watching your YouTube channel and reading plenty of reviews, comparisons etc. I have some idea of what may work for me but would be really happy to hear what you guys think about that.

We (me and my wife) are running interior design studio based in Poznan, Poland.
Our everyday operation goes with CAD files (up to 100 MB), Sketchup files (300-2000 MB) and a lot of .jpg, .png, .bmp etc.
Currently we have 6 workstations working at the same time, probably will get up to 8 some time soon.
We got to the point where we see that 2-3 TB on each workstation is not enough and at the same time we have copies of copies of copies.

Therefore we would like to move to one NAS of approx. 10 TB and keep and work directly from there with current projects.
Of course we will unify library of models and keep some archive projects as well.

All of current hardware (switch, cables, workstations) can easily handle 1000 MB/s.

After some reading and watching I ended up with idea of buying Qnap TS-453D + 2x WD Gold 10 TB (RAID 1/mirror).
Will that work fast enough when connected by both 2.5 GbE ports to switch?
Should I go straight for SSD as a cache or/and maybe expand DDR4 to 8/16 GB?
Do you see any other setup that may suit our needs better?

Best regards
Dawid Robaszkiewicz

[ed]

You always need to think about the slowest link in the chain. The hard drive speed is around 200MB/s. RAID1 will theoretically double tie read speeds up to 400MB/s, but write speeds will stay the same. Having 3 drives in RAID5/SHR1 would also increase your write speeds.
Having an SSD instead of HDD will significantly improve overall data transfer and access speeds. So often people get Qnap TS-464 series models with NVMe inside for live projects (volume on its own and not cache) and HDD RAID for finished projects where speed is not that important. People with no NVme cache option often use a spare bay on the NAS for SATA SSD which helps a lot too. You can have several volumes/pools.
Then we move on to the subject of LAN. The speed of 2.5GbE LAN is around 200MB/s. Connecting both LAN ports to the switch will allow two people to have full 2.5GbE bandwidth. This might be fast enough for CAD/Sketchup files. Video editors would install a 10gbe card (even multiple ports).
Increasing RAM size will not improve the overall speed. NVME caching will improve repetitious data transfer speeds. But nothing compares with actual NVMe storage volume.

I hope this helps.



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