Choosing a NAS for your Creative Environment

This is great! Network Attached Storage appliances have come a long way. I have used a NAS for at least 12 years and have enjoyed the convenience and ease of use of my personal 2TB drive. As a network administrator in my previous job, I used several NAS appliances in RAID 5 configuration as dual-location backup servers. However, one caveat, never let your NAS anywhere near the Internet. As a marketing gimmick, manufacturers are selling their NAS as a streaming media server. That means Internet connectivity. A huge NO NO. QNAP learned this the hard way when their NAS suffered a vulnerability a few years ago. They have since fixed this. As tempting and attractive as it sounds with all that storage space a NAS is designed to do just that. Store your data in a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives (RAID) securely behind a firewall away from the prying eyes of the Internet. JustSaying. By the way, this is great information and clearly presented! 👍🏽

Really appreciate the advice! Great video!

new subscriber and really enjoying your videos! tnx a lot!

OMG this channel is AMAZING! I hope you continue doing this work, is the first one so specfic to Content Creation and so deep and technical. Amazing stuff, thank you!

thanks for the video! It is helping me to learn more about it and make a decision on getting QNAP for my video editing.

This video is good but it strikes me as biased as you did not look at the full spectrum. There are harddrives attached to a router, these NAS you are showing, custom pcs with lots of harddrives and finally servers and cloud.
Lets face it, if we want to use the words a powerful nas, the QNAP is not in the conversation. A Ryzen 5 5600 or ryzen 7 would destroy qnap and full build would be cheaper than any qnap. For what you are talking about we could build a ryzen 5900x cheaper and that would destroy any qnap for the next 10 years at idle. To be realistic for the price we are starting to walk into the world of server builds over a pc build that is being used as a server. This is not even touching cloud options.
Lets be honest and place things into perspective. Hard-drives attached to a router is gimmicky and not very fast or reliable. It is not terribly cheap either in the scheme of things. Qnap and those like it, is nothing more than an expensive, low power, plug and play for those that dont want any effort on their storage device. PCs take a little more effort to set up but are cheaper and more powerful based on your needs but research is the key. Given the software out there, it is not any easier or harder at the end of the day once setup. Servers are always more expensive but built for the purpose, they have better capacity and can come with support. Cloud is a simple pay and play but storage is expensive and they are not responsible unless you pay for it to back up your storage.

So editing 6K RED or 4K Prores4444 is no problem with a 10Gbe connection? Even multilayer?

Hi Mike, thanks for the video's. Very helpful! I'm a wedding photographer with also many 4K video productions and have had it with all the external drives each year. I worked for 5 years on the QNAP TVS-872XT for high end video productions so I know how good a QNAP is :-). But now it's time to get one dor myself. Now there are two NAS's that seems interesting for me, the Ts-h973ax or the Ts-673a. I saw your video about the QTS hero vs the QTS tier, do you think I will also benefit with the tier version for 1000's of high res photo editing per project? For video it seems like a no brainer. Many thanks for the input! Cheers

I would love to see an option optimized for simulations, like houdini particles and fluid. Some kind of NAS that can handle both the amount of space and speed to get a responsive viewport reading the cached files from the NAS. Thank you. Great video, by the way.

Is it possible to render from a nas? For example rendering a 3d scene in maya or blender.

Or I guess the real guess is it possible to access files with blender or maya through a nas or do you need to move the nas from storage to work station to access the file? Sorry for noob questions

hi again
i wanted to confirm that is it possible that your pc has dual rtx a6000 in sli for 96g of vram for large complex scenes and a seperate pc with quad 3090 for processing

i really doubt if it is possible that blender using vram from pc gpus and processing power from render box pc with 4 3090

(Dual-kit 32 x 2=64 vs Two single-kit 32+32=64) use of two single-kit 32+32=64
will this affect the performance?

Thank you for your helpful videos, I really looking for long time someone like could help me in such thing like workstation GPU's. If you never mind could you please testing GPU's for Mac users? I have a 2015 15" MacBook Pro, I want spend money to upgrade, sadly that Mac do not support Nvidia and AMD GPU's are worthless comparing to Nvidia as I saw in many benchmark websites!

hello there
first of all thank you for so much information about rendering and stuff multi gpu etc as there is very less available on the platform
I have so many questions to which the internet has no answers and i know that u and only u can solve those

1
my work is all about rendering 3d models (arcitectural buildings statues game characters in 3d physics motion AI learning streaming and some linux in specific) i know that cpu rendering falls short in such workloads and single graphic cards take quiet some time to render so multi gpu is the only option left now the question is that should i go for quad 3090s with vrm being 24g or dual a6000 with sli and 96g vram also can i go for 4 cards with two sli running on all cards .

2
i beg you to make a special video on multi gpu not talking about the technical part like time taken but about vram and processing power in all possible configs like

1 card
2 cards no sli
2 cards sli
3 cards no sli
3 cards with 2 in sli
4 cards not in sli
4 cards with a pair of sli or 2 nvlink bridges
and analysis about vram and available horsepower to render

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
😖😖😖😖😖😖😖😖 ALSO MONY IS NO LIMITATION IN OUR CASE SO PREFER THE BEST

Hey Mike, thanks for sharing your knowledge on choosing the right NAS with us! Really helpful tips for any content creators looking to set up a centralized storage system for their data. Also, it was very kind of you to mention Exascend's products in your video. We appreciate that.:) Keep up the good work!

I never had any experience with NAS...very intimidating especially how to set it up and configure the right settings

Thanks for the video! This last Spring I was really getting sick of running out of storage and managing files across my multiple machines. So built a NAS.

Picked up a Synology DS1621+, a 10Gb Ethernet PCI add on for it, 6x Seagate Exos x16 16TB drives, 2x 512GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus m.2 drives. Also needed to update my home network to take advantage of 10Gb speeds so also picked up a QNAP QSW-M408-4C switch. Highly recommend that switch as it works great and for what it does is a decent price.

Put the NAS in a RAID 6 for protection for up to 2 drive losses. Know RAID 6 is slower but it is still giving me great speeds and the protection with storage amount that I need. It is definitely the best equipment purchase for my business that I have made.

This is very informative, thank for the video

That's a lot of info in 10 minutes. Looking forward to the 2nd part. I think a NAS could be my next hardware investment, I churn through hard drive space and it can be tedious to backup.

Editing of the videos are getting better. I watched some old videos and cuts were very rough. And would like to see rendering benchmarks on Mid range hardware and prev gen hardware too. NIce content btw keep it up <3

Can NAS be made up of SSD drives alone too?

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