NAS for Professional Photographer

[Enquiries]

Hi thanks in advance for all the advice and insights.

After years of considering it, the time has finally come for me to invest in a NAS system. Until recently I was fully convinced that my NAS would be a Synology, but with the recent controversy around the brand, I’m now unsure which direction to go.

I’m a professional photographer. My photo archive is currently over 20TB and grows at an average rate of about 3TB per year.

I’m fairly certain I want to invest in a 4- or 5-bay expandable NAS, using 12TB to 16TB drives per bay, most likely in RAID 5. The main goal is to have a centralized photo archive with redundancy, so that a single drive failure doesn’t mean data loss. I would also like to work directly from the NAS, both for storage and editing. My workflow is entirely based on Adobe software (Lightroom and Photoshop for photos) and DaVinci Resolve for video.

[ed]

For your workload, the safest and most “photographer friendly” options right now are the QNAP TS 464 or the new Synology DS425 Plus. Both give you enough CPU power for Lightroom and Photoshop, support NVMe caching to speed up preview generation, and allow you to expand storage later without rebuilding your entire archive. A 4 or 5 bay model with 12TB or 16TB drives in RAID 5 will give you the redundancy you want without eating too much capacity.

If you want to work directly off the NAS, I would strongly recommend using NVMe cache or a small SSD pool for your active projects. You’ll also want at least 2.5GbE networking, and ideally 10GbE if you want the experience to feel close to editing from a local drive.

Between QNAP and Synology, QNAP gives you more raw hardware for the money and is better for mixed photo plus video workloads. Synology gives you the smoother software environment, which many photographers prefer. Both will serve you well, and both fall comfortably within your budget.

If you want, send me the exact number of bays you’re comfortable with and whether you plan to add 10GbE immediately, and I can refine the recommendation further.

A few quick links if you want to compare:

QNAP TS 464
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=QNAP+TS-464&l...=ncmail-20

Synology DS425 Plus
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Synology+DS42...=ncmail-20

Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=IronWolf+Pro+...=ncmail-20