Best NAS Storage for Video Editing | What You Need To Know!

in the last year where i've been creating more and more videos and having to work with huge file sizes i faced a massive issue storage so i got myself one of these a qnap nas or network attached storage device and i populated it with over 60 terabytes worth of western digital storage and it has easily become one of the best additions to my setup [Music] now in this video i'm going to dive into what a nas is the many benefits that you can get from owning an ass and then go into detail about why i chose this one and how i spec it out specifically for the types of things that i do like video production and editing especially when i'm working with large 4k files basically i want to show you how it has completely changed my video workflow and share with you everything i learned along the way including all of the tips and tricks that i've found to make it the very perfect storage solution nas stands for network attached storage device and you can think of it a bit like a really large hard drive that stores all of your data in one safe and central location whether that be at home or at your office but it's also connected up to your network which means it can be accessed by all of your devices whether that be over ethernet or wi-fi and also multiple people can access and work from the nas at the same time so to give you an example of this i could be transferring video files from my macbook to the nas over ethernet let's say and then i have a colleague of mine who's also got his macbook connected to the nas over ethernet and he's taking those files off the nas and editing them on davinci resolve on his macbook we're both working off the same nas at the same time and that's something that's not really available when you use things like usb hard drives because they can only be connected to one device at a time now i've heard some people refer to an ass a bit like your own personal version of a google drive or a dropbox and it kind of is except it's not up there running in the cloud but instead everything is running locally and that comes with a number of benefits as well you get much faster transfer speeds you also don't have monthly usage costs and no sort of price hikes when you need to increase your storage but the big one really is you have full control over everything you don't have any privacy concerns about what those companies might be doing or looking at with your files there's also hundreds of other benefits like redundancy so that you can recover your files if one of these drives inside the nas was to break also the ability to scale as your storage needs grow so you don't end up with a mountain of external hard drives like i did just to put my footage on so to sum up what a nas is then it is a powerful always-on storage hub that gives you super fast access to your files whenever and wherever you need them so before i dive into some of the specifics of mynas let me actually fill you in of some of the goals that i had when i was designing it and what i wanted my setup to achieve firstly i needed a large storage solution really large storage solution because i shoot all of my videos in full black magic raw and even with an eight to one compression ratio it still works out at about 300 gigabytes for every hour worth of footage per camera combine that with the fact that when i'm recording on my atm extreme iso those eight iso recordings will easily fill a one terabyte drive after about two to three hours i've calculated therefore that i probably use around eight to ten terabytes worth of storage a year so i was looking for a nas that could give me 30 to 40 terabytes worth of storage straight away to future proof me at least for the next few years but also give me the option to scale as well if i need to secondly speed is key for me the whole point of having a nas is so i can quickly transfer all my files and my video footage onto it and then work directly off of the nas which brings me on to point number three i have to be able to edit directly off of it all of my footage all of the project files have to live directly on the nas so that when i'm editing on my macbook pro i'm not using any of its internal hard drive space or i'm not needing external usbs with the footage on instead everything is stored in one central location the nas and then i'm accessing that over the network now some of the things that i was actually considering as well when looking into a nas were the ability to have multiple users being able to access and edit directly from it simultaneously i needed it to be able to have backups and redundancy in place that i definitely wasn't going to lose any of my data and i also thought it'd be nice if there was the ability to access my files remotely when i'm not at home too finally i'll put my hands up i am an ass newbie six months ago i knew absolutely nothing about nasa's and was watching youtube videos probably like you are right now trying to learn everything there is about them so whatever nas and whatever drives i ended up getting they needed to be easy to use and low maintenance so after a lot of research and a lot of advice as well this is obviously what i've ended up with so let me talk you through my last setup and why i chose this specific setup by the way i will have full links to all of the products that i feature in this video down in the description below so if you want to find links to the nas or the drives that i've used they'll all be down in the link in the description below so let's kick it off with the nas enclosure itself it's a qnap ts h973ax and i actually went for the upgraded 32 gig of ram model rather than the base model which comes with eight gigs of ram it's a quad core nine bay nas which is actually running qnap's quts hero operating system and when you put all of that together it's an absolute beast of an ass so if you look at it from the front and specifically the top section first you've got five 3.5 inch sata drive bays and i've populated each one of those drive bays with one of these a western digital red plus and each one of these is 12 terabytes so i've got five of them giving me 60 terabytes up at the top here and the reason i went for these drive is because they're optimized and specifically designed for use inside a nasa enclosure unlike traditional desktop hard drives and they're tested for 24 7 use so it's perfect for the always-on nature of a nas the other benefit that i personally found with these drives is they're quiet you don't hear much of the mechanical ticking sound with them so i've got 60 terabytes of storage up here alone but that's not all because if you move down you've actually got here two 2.5 inch u2 nvme slots and then just below that you've got two 2.5 inch ssd slots as well and that's where things start getting interesting so firstly in the two bottom ssd drives here i've actually put two of these they're the western digital sa 500 ssds 500 gigabytes in size each and they enabled me to do something called ssd caching ssd caching is basically the nas working out what my most frequently and recently used data is and then storing that on the ssds which is much faster for me to access as a comparison the read speeds of one of the drives in the top here maxes out at about 196 megabytes per second but the read speed of one of the ssds is about 560 megabytes per second so that's about three times faster so ssd caching gives me instant access to the files that i use the most and it's actually a key component to what's going to allow me to edit directly off of the nas and that's what makes these drives ideal for things like photo rendering 4k and 8k video editing and other high performance tasks now the two remaining bays are the u.2 nvme ssd slots up here and they actually use the pcie gen 3 interface which makes them six times faster than the satter interface of the ssds that we've just seen and i've made full use of that by installing two of these they are the western digital ultra star dc sn 640 nvmes and i've had to read it because the name is just way too long but each one of these gives me 960 gigabytes worth of storage the important thing here is the transfer speed not 190 like the hard disk drives not 560 like the ssds but up to 3000 megabytes per second with these and for that reason i'm using them for two main things the first is i'm using it for the system storage pool so this is where the quts operating system is installed onto it's where all the apps are installed onto to make sure they run as optimized and as fast as possible and then with the remaining space of those drive i'm actually using it as where i store and host all my active editing projects because i want to make sure i have the fastest transfer and the read write speeds as possible when i'm editing my 4k and sometimes even 8k video footage i flip the nas around so that we can see the back and i want to point out a few things on here so firstly is the two 2.5 gigabit ethernet ports on the back of the device and then if you just look slightly lower there's actually a 10 gigabit ethernet port on there as well so that's going to allow you to connect this nas up to high speed networks and it also supports things like port trunking and failover but i'm not going to go into that in this video now of course if you don't have one of those high speed networks and you're rocking a standard one gigabit connection this nas will still work perfectly fine on that but for me the 10 gigabit port built into this nas was a real deal breaker because that's what's going to allow me to get faster transfer speeds 10 times faster than your standard network but also the key aspect was that is what is going to allow me to actually edit directly off of the nas multiple streams of 4k video to access the nas at full 10 gigabit speeds you need to have a computer that either has 10 gigabit networking built in or in my case i'm using a macbook pro so what i did is i actually picked up this the qnap thunderbolt 3 to 10 gb adapter this allows me to connect my mac to my nas and get transfer speeds of about 900 megabytes per second instead of around 100 megabytes per second on a standard one gigabit network i also just wanted to mention three quick other things about the back of this device the first is the usbc port at the top here and you can use that to expand your storage you'll remember me saying at the beginning of this video that one of the benefits of a nas is it's scalable and qnap actually sells an add-on enclosure that allows you to add an additional eight drives to your nas via this usbc port so you can scale and grow your storage as and when you need it the second thing is the two usb a ports on the back here and you can use that from multiple different things you can connect hard drives to them to offload files quickly onto the nas but what i actually use it for is i connect my uninterrupted power supply to it so that means in the eventuality of a power failure my ups will not only continue supplying the nas with power but it will also send a message over the usb to the nas to tell it to begin start shutting down and it will shut down the nas safely to protect the drives and all of my data on the drives and the final thing i want to mention is this the fan because although it's not overly loud if like me you're recording audio and video it's not something that you're going to want on the desk sat right beside you because it will get picked up so i actually have the nas living in my downstairs cupboard and when you close the door you can't hear anything it's perfect setting up the nas was quick and easy and i'm not going to go through the whole step-by-step process but i do just want to mention a few things that i did that really helped optimize the nas to make it as fast and as effective as possible especially for video editing in case you're looking to do the same firstly i set up the main storage pool on my nas to be a raid 5 configuration which gives a good balance between storage and redundancy the benefits of rave 5 are that it still gives a large speed gain for me that's around about 4 times the speed of just one of my drives but more importantly it allows for up to one of the five drives to fail or break without you losing any of your data the trade-off though is that it does require around one drives worth of space so whereas i may have 60 terabytes loaded into the top of my nas in terms of actual usable space that i've got it calculates to about 42 terabytes but the advantages you get from raid 5 is definitely worth losing that little bit of extra space secondly and this is really important for those setting up a quts hero based nas like i've got you're going to want to use your ssds for the system storage pool to make sure that your nas operating system and your apps are able to run as fast as possible so it's really important to remember that the very first storage pool that you create when you're setting up your nads is automatically designated as the system storage pool so you want to use your ssds for that don't go rushing in and using your main large hard drives as the system storage pool because then you're basically going to have to start from fresh wipe the nas and start again and then thirdly and i have mentioned this before but ssd caching is absolutely key so once you've set up all of your storage pools and all of your shared folders on those storage pools you're going to want to set up ssd caching for those shared folders to do that go to storage and snapshots and then go to the cache acceleration tab and click on manage there and select configure cache storage and then from there you can enable or disable cache acceleration for each of your shared folders on your storage pools so those are three setup tips that really help to optimize my nas setup so i thought i'd share them with you on this video also if you want more tips i would go and check out the qnap uk youtube pages they've got a bunch of fantastic videos on there to guide you through the process of the setup of your nas and also how to enable certain features in a lot more detail than i've done in this video it's a really great channel so do check it out but i want to get on to the all-important stuff what has my experience been like after now six months or so using an editing off of the nas and i want to share with you some of the speed tests some of my real use use cases and do a couple of demos so that you can see i couldn't find any videos when i was researching nasa's of people actually doing demos of editing off of nas and whether you were getting jittery footage and things like that so that's what i want to do this section this next section here will be like the real life use cases of editing off my qnap nas first up then i want to talk a little bit about using this qnap nas over a one gigabit connection which many of you will have in your homes and office because that's going to be your bottleneck it's not going to be the drive speeds and things like that i just want to show you so if we go over to the computer here i've got the blackmagic speed test or disc test app and i'm running from my macbook to the nas it's on my one gigabit network right now so if i just select a file somewhere on my nas and start the speed test we'll see the read write speed will be somewhere around the 100 megabytes per second and that's because we are being limited by the one gigabit connection which maxes out at around 120 megabytes in a perfect scenario so we're getting here around 109 for the right and 106 for the read so that's as expected and as i say that's the bottleneck the actual network rather than any of the drive speeds we know they can do far more than that but in my experience you can still do quite a bit of editing over a one gigabit connection let me give you some examples so what i've done here that you'll see in just a second is i've opened up davinci and i'm going to open up the project file for the video that you're watching right now because i'm editing it as i record it and what you'll see is how quickly it opens bearing in mind that all the footage and the project file is residing on the nas and i'm using for now just a one gigabit connection rather than my normal 10 gigabit connection so i'm going to open up the project file now which is this one here and there we go straight away everything's loaded in i can scrub through the footage perfectly fine if i hit play on any area it plays without any issue at all and bear in mind if you take a look at the top here they are full 4k 3840 by 2160 50 frames per second black magic raw files and they're playing perfectly fine as you can see in the timeline without any stuttering at all and that is possible over a one gigabit connection as i mentioned before i record in blackmagic raw at an eight to one ratio 50 frames per second that's around about 79 to 80 megabytes per second so it's not hitting that cap that we were seeing when we ran the speed test of about 100 105. and just to prove that to you if i actually open up one of those blackmagic raw files on my computer here and start playing it and at the same time we'll go over to the nas dashboard the qnap nas dashboard and monitor the transfer speeds you can see there that the outgoing data is around about and stays static at around about 80 megabytes per second so that's why i'm able to fully edit at least one stream of 4k footage in blackmagic raw over a one gigabit connection but if i wanted to do any more than that maybe some multicam 4k clips that's where you're going to run into issues or the other place where you might run into issues if you want to have multiple people editing off the nas at the same time and you're trying to do that over a gigabit connection that's where the higher 2.5 gigabit five gigabit and 10 gigabit connections come in and that's what i want to show you now one of the first things that i want to show you is what happens when i try and work with multiple 4k files within davinci over a one gigabit connection so you can see here i've got my sync bin and if i try and play back just two angles these are 4k files again uh 4k 50 frames per second blackmagic raw two angles over a one gigabit connection you can see it's it's stuttering it's just not able to do it and the reason is is because it's saturated that one gigabit network line but if i now switch over to my 10 gigabit adapter and hit play you can see it plays back as smooth as butter no jittering or anything and this is just with two 4k blackmagic raw clips but i could have more in here and it would be perfectly fine in fact if we go back to the qnap dashboard we'll be able to see roughly how many megabytes it's it's now requiring for two streams instead of one so if i change the adapter from adapted to which is my one gig card to my 10 gig card here you can see it's currently going between 159 about about yeah about 362 megabytes which is why it was struggling to to process or to deliver two files simultaneously over the one gig line but it's absolutely no problem at all over that 10 gigabit connection and that's the real benefit of it i could be doing a five six seven camera multi cam edit without any issues at all over that super fast connection so as well as the 10 gigabit connection actually making the editing process painless also from the other side of offloading footage onto the nas it's an absolute breeze as well and i'm going to demonstrate that i'm actually going to transfer a 100 gig blackmagic raw file from my mac to the nas and like i mentioned before i use the nvmes for all my active editing projects i'm just going to show you that that blistering speed what would usually take forever on a one gigabit network connection well it's 10 times faster on a 10 gig so i've got the uh the file here as i say if i open up the preferences you can see it's 97 gig so almost 100 gig there and if we copy it from my desktop and go over to my nas and go into my editing folder here and if i click paste that says it's going to take where is it around two minutes and if we keep an eye on over here there we go so we're already getting 780 meg but it goes up to around about a gig there we go it's just gone over so the transfer speeds especially when you are using u.2 nvme ssds as well is blistering but even with my large storage pool which is traditional hard drives not ssds the speeds are still really fast and absolutely able to use because of that ssd caching i'm still getting anywhere between 500 megabytes per second up to around 800 megabytes per second on the read so there you have it a little look into my new nas setup and how it really has drastically changed my editing video and storage workflow and as i said before there's still a lot that i am yet to dive into and want to dive into like the ability to remote access into the nas so i can access files remotely and this this is a 10 gigabit ethernet switch which will allow me to completely upgrade my home network from a one gigabit ethernet to 10 gigabit ethernet so that i can connect all of my devices up to the nas at 10 gigabits per second rather than just connecting my macbook directly to the nas with that high speed connection so i'm pretty confident to say that there'll be more nas related videos and more videos on this topic coming on my channel so if you want to see that let me know in the comments if you've had any questions about today's video put them in the comments and then i can answer them in those future videos and if you've enjoyed this video please do give it a thumbs up because that really helps and also if you're new here maybe you came from searching the word nas or maybe you've been here for ages watching my a10 videos please do make sure you're subscribed if you're not hit the subscribe button down below turn on the notification bell and then you will get notified when i eventually do a video about upgrading my network also i just do want to take one second to thank both qnap and western digital for helping to make this video possible and finally if you've got a specific question about your setup whether that be a broadcast setup or a question about implementing a nas in your office or home my email address is on screen now you can ping me a message we'll set up a one-to-one consulting session and get those questions answered for you once you've done all that guys i will see you on the next video

Channel: Alex Pettitt

Views: 97,809

Keywords: NAS video editing, NAS, network attached storage, QNAP NAS, QNAP video editing, 10gbe nas, video editing storage, nas for video editing, best nas for editing, nas for creators, organise footage nas, how to setup qnap, QNAP TS-h973AX, WD Red Plus, western digital ultrastar, video storage mac pc windows, raid storage explained, nas vs external hard drive, editing off a nas, How to video edit on a NAS, mac video editing nas, DaVinci Resolve NAS, 4K video editing nas

Id: ipIs2_KJsQc

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 13 2021