Video editing and large storage NAS with TB3

[bytheway]

Hello, thanks for the amazing site.

I have a huge amount of data stored over lots of drives, including:

• Synology DS416 NAS with 4x4TB WD Red drives > 10.8TB in SHR
  
• Synology DS218 NAS with 2x4TB WD Red drives > 7TB in JBOD (I don’t know why I chose this over RAID 0, I use this to serve my HTPC and don’t need redundancy [I always backup my NAS], so is RAID 0 better than JBOD?)
  
• Multiple WD Elements/My Book USB3 drives which I connect to a Windows PC and backup all my NAS and files on other drives so that they all get backed up to Backblaze Cloud storage for that one low price as you get unlimited storage for connected external drives
  
• Backups of drives using bare 3.5inch HDDs in USB3 docks
  

I have one Cyberpower UPS for the DS416.

New requirements:

• Large 20-24TB storage so I can move all my data onto the one NAS to have it consolidated and accessible
  
• Thunderbolt 3 connection to allow direct connection to Macs and PCs
  
• I will be creating video content for online training using a Sony 4K camcorder (need mic recommendation)
  
• Would like to be able to have video or high resolution photos that I am working on at the time in an SSD cache for fast access on my Macbook Pro 15inch 2018 (will upgrade to silicon Mac in late 2023)
  

Questions and advice:

1. NAS selection: QNAP TVS-472XT looks from reviews to suit, but interested in other options. I see that model I mentioned has various CPU options, for my use case what is the sweet spot?
   
2. HDD selection: looking at perhaps 4x18TB.  What do you think of Seagate EXOS 18?
   
3. Question: with high capacity 18TB HDDs in RAID (assume RAID5 ?), what are the typical read/write speeds and how this relates to the connection to clients in terms of where the bottleneck is…obviously TB3 bandwidth will exceed any HDD combination, but more interested in the ethernet speeds: 1GbE, vs 2 x 1GbE vs 2.5GbE vs 10GbE.
   
4. Same question as above when using SSD cache, would TB3 be needed to utilise the speed of an SSD cache, or even 2 x 1GbE system would work?
   
5. Is the SSD cache something that I could easily use in my workflow in terms of when working on high bitrate video, or is it not very seamless and require copying the file to the SSD Nvme storage manually?
   
6. Recommendation for SSD cache in the chosen NAS.  Videos won’t be extremely long or multicam (ie 20 minutes per video max to start but would like up to 1 hour)
   
7. UPS: essential? Recommendations for the chosen NAS?
   
8. Backup software that can ensure I always have up to date backups with minimal interaction.  Built into NAS or client based?  Even if built into NAS would like your recommendation on client based solutions for when I migrate all my data and get it all sorted nicely: incremental, ability to backup to cloud services, keep multiple backups up to date, spread backups over multiple discs if I have lower capacity drives, ability to sync remote servers over SFTP.
   

Thank you so much for your advice.