First NAS, edit on VM?

[Enquiries]

Hey guys, thanks so much for offering this advice portal! I'm sure I'm going to come off like a total knob. I am a total noob. I have no infrastructure other than a pretty high power desktop I use for work as a designer and photographer, and a bunch of random external drives. All the recent sales on data storage got me looking into setting up a NAS and raid. But of course as I went down the rabbit hole I learned about other things I could do like stream media with Plex and set up a virtual machine. So, I'm just looking for a recommendation on where to go from here. At a minimum I think I'll get something like a Synology 423+ to use for storage, backup and NAS. But, I'm interested in building something that would allow me to edit 4K video, raw photos, 3D design and other windows-based design applications from my iPad remotely. Not having a laptop means I have to be home to do my work. I don't really want to invest in a laptop that isn't powerful enough to do my work, so VM?

[ed]

Hi there! It's great to hear that you're interested in setting up a NAS for your data storage and backup needs. Based on your requirements, it sounds like the Synology 423+ would be a good choice for you if you only edit 1080p videos or do editing on a PC SSD and NAS use for finished projects..

In terms of editing 4K video and using design applications remotely from your iPad, there are a few things to consider. Firstly, editing 4K video remotely requires a lot of bandwidth, so you'll want to make sure you have a fast and reliable internet connection. You'll also want to make sure your NAS has enough processing power and memory to handle these tasks. The Synology 423+ has a quad-core CPU and 2GB of DDR4 memory, which should be sufficient for basic video editing and design work but not 4k.

If you're looking to run Windows-based design applications from your iPad, you could consider setting up a virtual machine on your NAS using software like Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) from Synology. This would allow you to run a virtual instance of Windows on your NAS, which you could access remotely from your iPad using a remote desktop app. However, you'll want to make sure your NAS has enough processing power and memory to handle this, and you may need to upgrade the RAM or CPU if you plan to use this heavily.

Overall, the Synology 423+ is a great choice for a basic NAS setup, but if you're looking to do more advanced tasks like editing 4K video or running virtual machines, you may want to consider a higher-end model like the Synology DS923+ or the QNAP TVS-h674. These models have more powerful CPUs and more RAM, which will give you better performance for these tasks.