Raid for color grading room

[Enquiries]

Hello,

thanks for all the information you share on your Channel!
im a Dolby Vision Certified Colourist working remotely from my home color suite. currently using OWC solutions...Thunderbay 8 x 8TB Ultrastar DC HC320, Thunderbay 6 x 6TB Ultrastar DC HC310 and ThunderBlade 4TB NVME.

im looking for a rack mount solution 8+ bays. possibly using Ultrastar DC HC560 20Tb drives. ideally something that is fast enough for uncompressed 4K camera RAW files, perhaps 25Gbe+ with PCIe expansion ( currently waiting to see if the new Apple silicon Mac Pro will have PCIe expansion ). If available I will use OWC Accelsior 8M2 internally for current projects and the raid for redundancy and backup.

as you can probably tell I need something as close to plug&play as possible. I do certify all my drives before installing them into a raid but that's the extent of my IT savynes!

Thanks again for your time.... you can see some of my work on the company site.

http://remotehauspost.com

looking forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,

Charles Kline

[Robbie]

Good afternoon Charles

Thank you for getting in touch. Apologies for starting my answer to your question with ANOTHER question, but just wanted to clarify something about your question before proceeding. Are you looking for a NAS rackmount solution or a DAS thunderbolt solution (i.e TB3 equipped)? I assume the former, but I didn't want to proceed down the road of making suggestions and then find out I got the wrong end of the stick!

If I was to assume that you are looking for a NAS system, I assume you are looking at a robust server that you do not intend to edit on live, but rather acts as a synchronized backup of your existing/current projects (hence the OWC PCIe NVMe Storage card).

Also, given you are looking at 20TB drive in this solution, is this to act as storage for projects/backups that you have on those Thunderbays/Thunderblade? Or is this an additional storage system running parallel with these? I only ask this because, at this scale, you are not going to have the biggest issue with your NAS hardware (most Xeon or Ryzen released in the last 3 or 4 years should be upto task), but I am more concerned about the storage media providing the internal throughput.

For example, I recently conducted a series of 10GbE tests on a modest Synology system with 4x 22TB WD Red Pro Hard Drives (RAID 5 configuration) and was able to hit 1GB (1000MB/s comfortably) with these in seq read (even on 16GB files), but seq write capped at 700MB/s or so. The file types you are talking about are going to dwarf these (I assume, based on your examples) and I am concerned that the drive media is going to be the bottleneck. My article here - https://nascompares.com/guide/wd-red-pro...vs-raid-5/

You can look into U.2 SSDs, which will give you 2000-4000MB/s each - which when you RAID them are going to be, frankly, incredible. BUT then you are going to lose a large % of that capacity (unless you multiple your budget by about 4-5x, as that is typically the ration of Price per TB on Hard drives vs U.2 SSDs in 2022). A system like this one would fulfil the 25GbE questions, as well as performance BUT it is still going to be an expensive proposition - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfEXYBpVDnM

Regarding plug n play architecture, that's not impossible and with the right parts in place, it is relatively seamless. But it would require someone be hands-on with the setup (i.e. setting the NAS up with a iSCSI storage target/LUN, then mapping it to your local machine(s) so it appears like 'local' storage - as otherwise some editing suits doing play with targetted NAS storage.

I'll hold off with this long-ish email a little until I hear back from you, as I want to get a bit more direction on where you want to go on this. So, to recap:

1- NAS or DAS (Thunderbolt etc)?

2- Ideal Overall Storage Capacity?

3- For use as archival/cold/warm/backup storage or for live editing?

4- Cost/Budget you have? (I am not a retail shop etc, I am just asking so I can narrow the search down)

5- # of users who will be accessing/using this at the same time

6- Average size of a project that would be handled by this system typically (so, that is regardless of whether this is for live editing, or just an idea of the kind of daily data weight that this system is expected to push through.

Once again, apologies for asking MORE questions, I just want to help you get this narrowed down to the right 1-3 solutions. Have a lovely week.