NAS Compares Idiots Guide to Editing Video on a NAS Drive (via 10Gbe or Thunderbolt)

Video Editing over 10Gbe or Thunderbolt with a NAS Drive – The Easy Way​

Of all the industries that have grown in terms of data storage, video editing and production has got to be one of the largest generators of unique and ever increasingly size data in the world. From wildlife photographers and fashion, to YouTube content creators and large scale movie production, video editing is BIG business and require power, speed and efficiency from it’s hardware environment in order to achieve success. Up until a few years ago, editing footage in post-production with popular editing software (Final Cut, Adobe Premiere, DaVinci, etc) could be done quite easily on your local HDD/SSD (your C:/) or via a connected external drive. However fast forward to last 2-3years and you see that the SIZE of the footage in 4K and 1080p, as well as the performance required to edit it is significantly higher than the performance available to most SATA SSD inside your machine or an external drive. From there the industry moved into NVMe SSD and Thunderbolt DAS RAID external storage, which do get the job done BUT with the prohibitive cost of NVMe AND it’s low top capacities, as well as the poor portability of Thunderbolt RAID DAS in the field and its single-connection-allow architecture, make them good but not perfect. Which leads me to 10Gbe and/or Thunderbolt NAS for video editing. Now, it too is not perfect, BUT it ticks ALOT of the boxes. Video Editing on a NAS over 10Gbe or via a Thunderbolt-equipped NAS drive presents a number of advantages and improvements of what came before, such as:

• Editing on a NAS over 10Gbe can provide up to 1000MB/s performance, which can be further increased with link aggregation or upgrading network interface ports later down the line
• Editing over Thunderbolt NAS can get up to 1600MB/s, depending on the storage media and thunderbolt NAS you choose
• Editing on a NAS allows you to upgrade the connection during the storage solutions lifespan (with PCIe upgrade cards on both the NAS and cards/external adapters on your physical system) to increase the connection to double, triple or even quadruple your performance
• Editing on a NAS allows you to improve the workflow in your video editing with multiple users in the chain. A NAS can be accessed by multiple users at once and each can have a dedicated speed and priority of access depending on their task needs
• Not only can you edit on the NAS, but factoring the NAS into your backup strategy allows you to significantly lessen the chances of losing your data – run a duplication task in the NAS, or use the NAS Backup Software to duplicate key files on a schedule or live to numerous devices (another NAS, USB, the cloud and more)
• Editing on a NAS also allows you to upload raw/pre-production footage remotely whilst off-site, so it is then ready to be edited on as soon as you return to your desk

Editing on a NAS Drive is not for everyone and thought is not quite as easy to set up and use as the plug-and-play architecture of traditional USB and Thunderbolt DAS, it isn’t that hard, provides numerous other advantages to your network hardware environments and also gives you the means to improve your entire workflow. So, let me show you how to set up a 10Gbe or Thunderbolt NAS for editing video. But first, let’s go through a few important things to remember before you proceed.





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[jeyare]

absolutely agree, with one change
from: Idiots Guide
to: Idiot's Guide

Background:
the instructions were probably written for single-man video editors and not for an experienced group of intermediate or professional editors
then:

There are ways to creating mounted targeted drives, using live sync tools with client apps from each brand (eg Synology Drive and QNAP QSync) with your local system to make a NAS appear as local storage for your video editing software to interact with.

Only madman will suggest the usage of Syno Drive as tool for live sync of mounted target NAS drives for video editing environments. Just imagine the amount of the synced capacity over LAN in every saved change. Plus absolutely unnecessary versioning = because you don't need change video sources (as is known in office dosc) = it's job of used editing sw. Then Syno Drive DB increase. OMG.

If you plan on using Hard Drives, you will need to have at least 4 Drives in a RAID 5 to get performance speeds that compare to a single SSD – the more drives, the BETTER!

- QLC SSD (every) with 4k block (default FS setup) are totally unsuitable for write-intensive workload (video media for an example). Every HDD (NAS certified + Enterprise) can beat them for such purpose in sustainable speed performance for large file transfers. And this topic isn't about 10MB file sizes. Don't forget, that HDD Seagate Enterprise 7E8 you can purchase for a better price than Ironwolf (less performance).
or
- low cost TLC SSD (with small amount of SLC cache) because for large sequential write operation you need sufficient amount of faster SLC cache within the TLC SSD
Don't mention about RAID5. As was written many times, RAID0 is more reliable for video editing purposes=speed is first, because you have catalogue in diff disk group. The proposed RAID5 you can use for different purpose than editing (e.g. catalogue, archive).