Building My ULTIMATE 10 Gigabit Video Editing Storage Network! (Part 2)

what is up everyone welcome to part two today is finally the time where we get to power this stuff up and configure it all so i'm going to take you through every single step of the journey first time setup of both of these pieces of equipment the nas and the switch and all of the configuration that needs to take place to get a setup like this up and running and in a functional state so by the end of this video you guys should see me editing to and from this nas over a fairly speedy network hopefully if everything goes to plan so let's give it a go never done this before let's learn together it's going to be loads and loads of fun [Music] [Music] here's all the kit behind me it's time to power it up quick little reminder first we've got the new nas the new switch 10 gig link between these two the new switch is connected to my current switch so this stuff has become part of my same network and we also have a third cable coming from the new switch so we will be able to connect directly with 10 gig ethernet with my main machine now here's the other end of that cable and for those of you who know i've got a mac mini m1 and it famously doesn't have 10 gig ethernet not even as an option so that's quite a shame but not a huge deal because we can use a simple adapter like this you take your rj45 plug it in and then on the other end we have a handy little usbc little usbc cable goes in and then you have thunderbolt or usb4 i guess they're calling it now to 10 gig networking if you're on the pc side if you've got a desktop it's even easier because you can just plug in any kind of 10 gig pci card that you find off ebay so you're completely sorted but anyway let's get this stuff powered on so for the switch we'll just plug it into power not sure if you can see that on camera there's a little green light that has popped on and is now flashing because the switch is booting up now it doesn't matter what order we do any of this in we can just fire it all up i'm just making it all dramatic because i'm very excited i want to prolong the experience so next up let's power on the nas power button on the front here we go three two one and she's come to life all the leds gave a nice flash i can hear the drive spinning up little beep i guess that means it's booting up so this is my existing network cable to the mac mini we've unplugged that just to avoid any kind of confusion we only want the one new network connection connected to the machine to set all this up that way we know exactly what's going on so let's plug in our usbc cable now if you've got an older mac mini or a different machine entirely you may have on-board networking and then this step isn't required whatsoever but for the majority of mac users an adapter will be necessary so i'll put some links to some options for adapters down in the video description so there we go we've got some leds on the adapter to show that that is connected we'll just pop that there for now none of this is permanent it's all just going to be there until we get this finalized so we now have an activity led for our mac mini as well which is connected to the final port on the switch port number eight noticeably we have no activity on port one we're using a dac cable direct attach copper cable from my existing switch to this switch now i'm not actually 100 sure that in my setup this is going to work as i expect because my existing switch does not have any sfp plus ports it only has standard sfp ports which are one gigabit per second ports now equipment can get a bit fussy when connecting sfp to sfp plus it is totally possible and i'm in fact doing that with some of my existing equipment but it sometimes takes a couple of extra steps so what i'm going to do at this stage is log on to my switch see what's going on see if the port is active possibly restart the switch and see if i can get some activity using this cable between the two switches so unfortunately i can't get these two switches to communicate with this dac cable so we'll look into that a little closer later on in the video we are for now gonna use a normal rj45 cable because if i plug this in it should just work straight away i'm not gonna mess around because we have the three available ports i'm not gonna mess around trying to get this to work when i know we could be here for quite some time trying to get it to work so let's just connect it in a more straightforward way i'm going to pull out one of my cables from the existing network here plug this right in and run the other end up to the switch we have an activity led for that port that we just plugged in before we start configuring this stuff we need to actually check that we're up and running on the network and everything is working properly because we've connected our machine in a brand new way we just need to see that that connection is physically working so let's dive into the network preference pane and take a look at what's going on and we can see right away we are connected with the new adapter we can tell because it states it's a thunderbolt ethernet adapter we've also been assigned an ip address via dhcp so that is absolutely perfect everything is up and running so in theory everything on my network should be as normal and indeed it is i can see my three existing servers right there and because of that we should have internet connectivity there we go google.com up and running no problem whatsoever so we are ready to start configuring our nas it's that simple we haven't touched the switch yet even though it is a managed switch we don't need to configure any additional settings right out of the box it will work as just a normal switch and then those settings are there for later on if you do need them of course we could dive into the switch right now and start configuring things if we wanted to alter anything but i think a good place to start would be the nas because right now all we need is to be able to communicate with it and that is what the switch is currently doing for us so qnap actually have this funky little app that finds any qnap devices on your network it is called q finder pro and i've installed it on my mac you guys can see it's just a nice little application and there we have it both machines are indeed listed so we have the nas and we have the switch right away it recognizes that we have a nas on the network that is not yet configured and it's just popped up asking us if we'd like to go through the setup and we will go for yes so it's now opened a browser window and the rest of the setup will be conducted through the browser which is perfect we do have another little notification here flashing away q finder is also warning us that smtp is not currently set up we're not going to do that right away we'll do that later on we'll just go for the configuration of the nas right now so we're going to start the smart installation there is an option here to switch to a different os so currently we're on welcome to quts hero so this is their most advanced operating system supports zfs this is as i mentioned in part one as zfs nas but you can switch to standard qts if you do want to now i'm a new qnap user i may as well dive all in and go straight for quts hero and go for that configuration and setup so right away it's going to look for new firmware for the device and it has indeed found a new version so we will of course update that to the latest before we continue with the setup so you get a couple of audible little beeps while the nas is busy restarting and booting up and doing different things and on our screen we can see that it's restarting and there's a little bit of a countdown it's going to reconnect automatically so just sitting here waiting for this to finish and once we're up and running with the new firmware we will be able to carry on with the installation so the new firmware is now presumably all installed and we are up and running so let's see what happens this time and we are ready we are in the setup process so i have a sort of doctor who theme naming theme going on with all of my devices my servers and i'm going to continue the trend now this is likely to be the speediest most capable nas i'm ever going to own at least in the next kind of foreseeable future so i'm gonna go right for the big one i'm gonna call this galafrey now it's completely up to you guys what you call your nas it doesn't have to be sci-fi related obviously but for me the doctor who naming structure is good fun next up we're going to enter our password um i'm not going to use the suggested password from safari just because for now we want to put a really straightforward password in for us to recognize quickly um pretty okay security on that one but we will change that later on once we get into the account section this is just for the default admin account um presumably later on if it's like the other nas equipment i've used you'll just be able to add as many users as you like later on at any point so that is perfect let's go next so for time we're already synchronized with an ntp server by default and it's found the correct time zone so that's absolutely perfect for us aha now we're getting into the good stuff so we have the option right away in the setup wizard to set up our static ip uh we're gonna actually leave it as dhcp for now we'll change it later on and the reason for that is because currently my entire machine is actually on the wrong network i've got multiple vlans set up and currently we're not on the correct one because i've plugged into a random ethernet port on the front of one of my switches that's something that we need to go over later but that's kind of specific to my setup for anybody watching this that doesn't know the difference between the dynamic and the static ip address it really is a good idea if you can get it up and running to go for a static ip address if you know this information and you want to give yourself a static ip it's great because you will always have the same ip you'll be able to access your server no matter what happens less issues will present themselves down the road if you use a static ip over using a dynamic address but we're going to stick with dhcp for now until we get it configured a little bit better later on so we'll focus on that in a different part of the video for now we'll stick with this this is the section where we get to tell the nas what systems we're going to be connecting with primarily that way the nas can put services in place to allow us to connect to those systems in the most efficient way possible so by default we've got windows and mac checked here i'm actually going to uncheck windows i will never ever connect to this nas from a windows machine we're going to talk about the difference between afp and smb a little bit later on we only really need to use smb for this setup because this is going to be a video editing that's for us and i'm a final cut user smb is recommended so we only need to tick this little mac one here and that is good enough for us and then we have our summary of all of the settings so we've set up our user account we've set up the time that was set up anyway for us we have still a dhcp dynamic ip address and we want the mac services let's finish off by applying these settings so at this stage this is interesting so at this stage this is when we will lose our data so if we were putting used drives or drives that had data on them in the nas this little dialogue here is telling us that this is possibly where we can lose our data here while we initialize the system so we've got brand new drives that is not a problem so far it's asking if i want to save this password in my keychain we are not going to do that and here we go it's applying the settings to the nas and it's doing so extremely quickly so we are done congratulations let's go to nas management so okay so we'll log in with our admin account which is the only account on the machine currently that was really quite speedy by the way just a few minutes but we haven't set up any of our storage yet so that's one thing to keep in mind that's just the initial setting up of the machine privacy notice let's go loading here we are at the quts hero desktop so wow nice first time it's gonna give me a little guided tour through the os it seems so here we are we've had loads of stuff thrown at us here um we've got a few different windows it looks like we can only click oh no we can click on any window that's cool so that's like a help page so this little window here details the snapshots feature which appears to be very similar to something like a time machine so you can revert back to any point on your nas or just retrieve a file from a previous snapshot and it'll only save the changed file so any files that you've modified or files that you've added it won't just keep replicating the files with each snapshot so it's not like a clone backup it's a block based backup so that's really cool um we will of course set up snapshots as well right here it's telling us a little bit about backing up the snapshots or saving the snapshots to a different nas entirely or a different storage pool this is quite cool so if you've got an older nas maybe you're upgrading from an older one and you're replacing it with a quicker one you could then repurpose that older one for backup and it could save your snapshots or you could in the future buy a lower powered machine something not quite as quick but then you could use it in the future for snapshots that's really quite cool or you could just use a different storage pool it's quite interesting the way that the os just sort of throws all this up here for you to look at but it's all relevant so this has now left us with the overview of our disks we can see our disks that are installed in the machine let's see what this is this is just a help section i think we can close it we're here to help we'll try and figure this out by ourselves this is talking about some additional licenses that you can purchase we won't show that again we'll close that okay cool we can see that all five of our drives are recognized and they are all the same model wd red pro 10 terabytes so it's seeing is a 9.1 terabyte disk we have five of them and then we have our two ssds in the top two slots and then we have two free ssd slots as well let's have a bit of a recap of where we are now so we have our nas up and running on the network we know the switch is working we can communicate with the nas we've set up our admin account and the nas is now booted to the operating system latest firmware version we're sat here on the desktop and it's time to further configure the system so we can actually use it i think what we'll do is make that storage pool create the storage pool so that we know where we stand we actually have a storage pool on the system it's basically a case of taking all of these separate disks that we now have sitting in our nas physically and creating one giant disk out of all of them with a few different options thrown in the mix so let's have a little look now one really cool thing about the zfs nas is we can store stuff directly on the storage pool with other nas systems um that i've used in the past we have to create the storage pool then we have to create a volume and then depending on the hardware sometimes there's some limitations as to what you can do with the volumes and then you have to make your shares and you can you can store things on on the shares that are stored on the volumes and it's sort of this kind of big kind of layer of it's basically like a big cake all these different layers with zfs you can store directly on the storage pool much quicker access and for that reason it means that you get quicker behavior in things like raid rebuilding it'll go a lot quicker on a system with zfs like this nas so let's have a look at creating this storage pool a storage pool combines many disks into one pool of storage space so that is a much kind of more refined way of explaining what i just explained so let's go ahead and create our storage pool so here in the list we can see all of our different drives that are in the system right now so we have seven out of nine drive bays populated you can see this little drop down here i believe this is here um for possibly if you have an expansion connected to the nas then you would be able to select it here and then it would tell you how many bays were populated in the expansion so if you add that unit in the future you can dive back in here and create another storage pool with your expansion we of course just have the nas itself so we only have one option here further on down we have the list of drives so first of all we have all of our hard drives and this will actively calculate the amount of space we are gonna have so let's select all five of our hard drives so one two three four and five after selecting some drives it automatically selects a raid type for us what's cool is the raid types that we can't use are grayed out another nice thing about this process as well is if you're unsure of what raid type does what then there is a little description here so we could put this guy in raid 0 if we wanted to get our maximum capacity and speed but then of course if a drive dies we are in trouble we can't retrieve any of that data now it's kind of for me a choice between raid 5 or raid 6. raid 5 will allow for a single disk failure so if you select raid 5 build up a storage pool and then two of your drives die simultaneously or a drive dies during a rebuild then you've lost all of your data raid 6 gives you a little bit of a better safety net because you can have two drives fail but it is at the expense of a little bit of read speed so for us raid five is where we wanna be and particularly in my case as well i've got other systems that i can offload data onto now raid is not by any means a backup um it's just a nice little bit of security to have you can have a failed disk you can pop it out it will rebuild job done but that is no replacement for a real backup so for me this will get backed up nightly to another one of my systems anyway so i'm not too worried about raid 5 only one disk failure heck you know maybe i if i was living really on the edge i'd go for raid 0 but then it is really inconvenient if a disc does die so we'll go for raid 5 nice and safe good safe reliable option very common raid type to be used on general purpose for all sorts of different tasks for video editing this should give us enough speed there is a difference of approximately 10 terabytes between selecting raid 6 and raid 5 so to get us that little bit of extra security with another disc we're looking at losing 10 terabytes there so we get a nice well-rounded capacity of around 35 terabytes when using raid 5. that is a nice lot of storage we've got this little tip down here telling us to select ssds if we want to improve the performance of the storage pool now i believe if we do that at this stage it's not going to quite achieve what we want to achieve so if we select these ssds yes our total capacity of the storage pool drops dramatically just over two terabytes so we don't want to combine the ssds with the mechanical drives on the storage pool not at this stage we want to use the ssds later on for caching and we will set that up separately i believe so deselecting the ssds and swapping back to a raid 5 this is exactly how we want it all five of our hard drive selected no ssds let's continue to the next step the system will assign this storage pool as the system pool selecting ssds will improve system pool and general system performance do you want to change your disk selection now at this stage with these kind of pop-ups i am definitely no expert here now i presume that setting up the storage pool on the hard drives is the best thing to do because that's our mass storage and then selecting the ssds as a cache that makes the most sense because like we saw when we selected the ssds yes it may improve the speed of the storage pool but you're looking at two widely different kinds of disks ssd versus hard drive 500 gig versus 10 terabytes it just makes no sense to put them all in one storage pool and i can't see how that will really benefit us in the long run so we're going to ignore these messages and we will set up the ssds later on could be the wrong step maybe i'll find out later on down the road but for now i'm going to set it up in the way that i think is the best way to set it up and we'll go from there so we have a couple of options to configure on the next page interestingly by default we have over provisioning enabled and it's allocated to 10 of our storage pools that equates to 3.51 terabytes quite a lot of space there to my knowledge over provisioning is really only necessary when working with ssds to prolong their lifespan um giving the ssd uh 10 swap space so really i don't think we need to enable over provisioning for this storage pool so we were talking about snapshots earlier when that pop-up came up this option is to enable pool guaranteed snapshot space it's currently set to 20 i think this is a good amount of space for us to begin with i think we can change that later on anyway um but we won't be storing our snapshots outside of this qnap box we'll probably be backing up from it in a slightly different way maybe i'll have to see how that all pans out so for now we'll just leave this at default that means that there's definitely guaranteed space for snapshots so for those copies of those old deleted files uh on the system itself we can see a little illustration of this here and it notes as well that snapshots will be automatically deleted when it becomes full so when space is at premium it'll just clear out those oldest files that you haven't retrieved yet those old snapshots from the oldest date possible so it's very very much like time machine um but we will just leave this at default for now 20 is fine alert threshold is then presumably when the nas will tell us it's got to 80 full and we will get an alert to tell us that we're running out of storage or getting close to running out of storage so we'll leave that default as well next up the summary page is just telling us everything that we entered so we can have a quick look back at our options i'm pretty happy with everything we've selected here as i say first time setting up a qnap nas so doing this from you know sort of not a great deal of knowledge um but i'm pretty happy with these options and i think this will do us okay we can always start again and reconfigure the nas if it's not performing how i wanted to perform or if i've done something incorrectly so that's exactly why we're making this series i can dive back in and i can show you guys exactly what i did wrong um interesting how it notes that it'll make some default shares or several default shares it claims it'll make um so that'll be interesting we'll see what happens there but anyway let's just continue and okay and it will now create the storage pool so already up to nearly 50 it's really quick uh making this storage pool i can hear the discs crunching away behind me um it's just doing its thing we've got a little illustration over here of our unallocated space and our alert level and this interface is really nice it tells you absolutely everything you need to know i guess when it's created it will be able to drop this down and expand information further aha here we go we can double click and we can take a look at the pool one thing i'm finding quite interesting is in the background this nas is downloading a load of stuff and doing things on its own basically so there's a malware scanner that it's downloaded scan the system scan is complete all sorts of things popping up i could see these little notifications down here just like that and we have the notifications listed here so yeah it's very clear about everything that it's doing quite interesting because i haven't told it to do any of that at the moment but um i don't really have a problem with any of this so i guess that's absolutely fine it's really convenient and just like that we're done our storage pool is up and running it's created three default shares and this is also where we can add a new share so we'll do that a little bit later on first of all though i want to get these ssds doing something so i think the best thing to do we've got five high-capacity hard drives and we've got two lower capacity ssds i think the best thing for us to do is set them up as an ssd cache right now to see exactly how much performance we get with that um i'm not sure if it's the best way forward for video editing really not sure but we'll do that and we'll see how the system performs so let's click on cache acceleration and we should be able to set this up with both of our ssds i think check out this little note zfs ensures that files are sequentially written to the cache so ssd over provisioning is not required how cool is that okay so let's continue setting up this ssd cache and it spotted our ssds right away ssd1 ssd2 for a cache type we do have a zfs nasir so we can choose this fancy zil synchronous io log wow that's a mouthful isn't it can increase random write performance to enable the right log you must select an even number of disks to change the cache type after cache blah blah blah so this will it won't be a true right cache but it will increase the random write performance so we'll go for it first time for everything first first time of first many many firsts today so let's just select that one it's big words and i don't know what half of them mean so let's do it like that aha this is interesting so i did not know that you selected the ssd caching either enabled or disabled per share so that is definitely really interesting you can just choose to accelerate a certain share if you like which is really cool so i presume if i create a new share after creating the ssd cache then i will be able to change that later on we'll just leave them all enabled for now maybe it would be a wiser decision to only select the share that we're actually editing to and from um but we'll wait and see how that pans out so this appears to be quite an important option cash mode random i o recommended for virtualization and database applications so that is not us all i o recommended for file serving and media streaming now that's a little bit closer to what we're doing we're not streaming media as such but we will be actively playing back from the nas so in that sense yes we're streaming media um but we are indeed serving files serving a lot of video data now it does say as well your cache should be quicker uh only select all i o if your cache read performance is better than the pool read performance the cache read performance will indeed be better there are two ssds uh whereas the drives will definitely be slower so we'll go for all i o on this one let's hit next and here we go another summary of all of the options we've selected to create this ssd cache so i think we'll go ahead and create this i can't really see any areas where we've slipped up not at first glance anyway so we'll create this and this is just a little warning about data loss removing an ssd blah blah blah okay cool i understand we're not going to go yanking anything out so that's absolutely fine so again similarly to creating a storage pool uh we are creating here our ssd cache what's cool is the read raid type for the cache is raid zero so both of those disks will be giving us sort of you know double the read speed of a single ssd which is nice that's going to be quite a speedy read cache interested to know how much that's actually going to help us with video editing but we can do some research on that we'll do our own research in terms of real world performance and i'll also look into this a little bit deeper as well to see if that is the best option for us here because we only have a total of one terabyte of ssd i don't see really a way that we can use them any better because if we create another storage pool with the ssds and say okay maybe this is our uh scratch disk if we're going to run those in anything other than raid 0 we're not going to have a great deal of capacity but then again raid 0 on ssds is a lot less risky this is really kind of an interesting one to ponder over but we'll see how it performs set up like this first so cache is created it took next to no time a bit of a running theme with this nas nothing is taking very long at all an entire step that is removed is the volume creation we will now go and make a shared folder directly on the storage pool which is wonderful so let's go and give that a go so this is our overview of the ssd caching once we start storing data on the nas we'll see some statistics here so let's jump back into where we were before as you guys can see the interface overall is very very detailed at every stage you get absolutely everything laid out here in front of you all the information on your drives this is a very cool visual representation of exactly what is in what bay it'll even tell you the empty ones of course the ssds everything like that very nice so let's create a new shared folder and see how that goes i'm interested to know if we can then enable the cache on that folder now that we've already created the ssd cache if we if we can do it in that order um so we'll just create one shared folder for now and this will be our kind of primary do everything share so for some of my other systems i've got a few different shares for different things i've got things separated out quite extensively but for this because we're only going to be using this nas for video editing it's not really going to be that necessary for us to make several different shares we'll just roll with one share for now so let's go ahead and get started so i've been having a think about what i actually want to call this share because i haven't yet thought about the way i'm going to organize the data this is all kind of new so i think what i'm going to call it is active projects and then this way i know that this share is anything that i'm working on right now or the bulk of the the final cut library this is where stuff kind of resides so i think the active projects um share makes the most sense to begin with here now we get to select what kind of size we want it to be out of our available capacity we're going to leave this on thin provisioning so that space is allocated to this share on demand rather than reserving the space using thick provisioning um we're just going to keep it as kind of flexible as possible here so use thin provisioning but i guess this then becomes a maximum value i'm going to bump this up to 10 terabytes just because we want loads of space and i'm not going to be storing much else on here so i may as well uh we might be able to change that later on we probably can we're going to leave most of these options completely stock because i'm not going to go fiddling with stuff that i'm not 100 sure about but we will turn off compression because i believe performance overall will be impacted um there may not be a direct difference in actual performance but it could be the case where the nas is working more in the background to actually compress that data in a situation where we really don't need to so if this was a general purpose share data that was going to be stored on here for a long time then by all means get it compressed and you'll end up with more storage at the end but for us we don't need to worry about compression here deduplication is not available to us anyway because as it states here it requires 16 gigs of ram so that's an example like i said in part one of this series certain features in zfs they're going to need a lot of ram so this is an example of one of those features you can't use deduplication with only eight gigs of ram under performance we have the ssd cache enabled so i guess that answers my question from earlier our cache is there that's not a problem and also we have the fast clone option enabled which according to this information here means that transferring this data between one share to another within the nas itself will be quicker so that is again another zfs benefit everything else we're gonna leave the same and next access privileges for this share we've only got our admin users set up that's just reminded me we will need to set up a standard user for myself on here that is not the admin so that's fine for now um of course we can change all that later so we've got all sorts of options here uh one that stands out at me is the time machine option if you wanted to use this as time machine for mac os you can specifically state that here uh we're gonna disable the windows preview option we don't need that there's some guest stuff up here you can configure i think we can leave everything else pretty much the same so having a quick read over the summary everything looks okay to the best of my knowledge um i've set this up to again just like the other settings that we applied earlier everything that i think is right at this stage i'm basically enabling so that's absolutely fine we're just gonna run with that we've got a message here about content source folders doesn't apply to us so we won't show that message again and here it goes creating that shared folder and boom quick as a flash just like everything we are up and running so we have our little lightning bolt underneath the new shared folder that we've created that says that the cache is working so yeah it just populates automatically under the cache acceleration um preference here so you can see that that share we've just created is now up and running so that's brilliant and that was kind of the big question i had was is there a specific order that you've got to do this in but apparently not it seems extremely flexible so this share right now we have permission to access it as an admin so something really quite exciting let's just try and access it right now from my mac um let's see if we need to do anything else i don't think we do if we go into finder and have a little look at our network devices our new server is indeed listed so we have galafray we'll connect as the admin for now so connect as connect admin and the password that we set up for our admin account on the server and there are our shares our shares are all listed now because we've logged in as the admin uh we can see all of the shares that the nas has created automatically for us as well but what we can do later on is when we actually create my user my tom user i can just select the shares that i actually need access to uh from my other system so it'll look a little cleaner here so we've got a folder and we've now mounted that share this is our video editing share our active projects let's just try and copy something to it these are the screen recordings that i'm actually making for you guys right now so this file let's take a look at the size of it it's 2.14 gigs so not a tiny file but not a big file by any means let's just drop it onto the nas and whoa whoa okay [Music] what was that i really thought we'd need to do a lot more fiddling to see those kinds of speeds um i think i've gotta have a little play with this and see what it does [Music] i've been running files back and forth and also doing a couple of cheeky speed tests and i am really impressed now of course we won't know the full story until i actually configure the nas as my video editing destination and we start editing um but the early signs all look fantastic now what i think we'll do is we do have a little bit more configuration to do on the nas before we jump in and try some editing but first of all i think we should take a look at the switch as a little bit of a change we've been configuring the nas for a little while now let's dive into the switch fiddle with some settings in there or at least have a little look at them and then we can go back to the nas and take a little look at what's going on we can also have a look at these sfp plus ports and see if there's anything in the switch that is stopping us from using our sfp plus ports with my sfp port on my other switch just like last time we are going to pull up q finder pro and we should see our nas that we've configured here we go there's gallifrey and we also see the switch so it's showing us both of the qnap devices on our network this is reminding us about smtp we will set that up a little bit later on but it's not really high on the priority list at the moment we've got a couple of other things that we need to get sorted we haven't even made a user for ourselves yet on the nas but like i said let's jump into the switch and have a quick look at the switch before we move on just as a little bit of a change of pace here so this is the login page for the qnap switch system qss we've got an admin account on here already it seems so let's have a little look at what the password could be let's try a couple of standard passwords admin admin admin password no password at all possibly login no okay um i think the best thing to do is pull up the manual for the switch and have a little look i've managed to really quickly pull up the manual for this switch simply by going to my switch product page on the qnap website going to the download center and then clicking on the manual and doing a quick search for default password reveals that this is going to be the mac address of our switch so that's really easy we can use q finder pro again to have a look at the mac address for our switch and then that'll just give us our password straight away with the mac address entered let's give that a go and here we go this is our new password so we'll enter a password for the switch okay this is now our password and we should be able to log in with our new password here we go so we are in and we can see right away we have some information on the screen about our switch so on the top left we have our port status we just get a nice basic illustration here of the ports and whether they're active or not so these are the three ports that we currently have active over here we have system information so just some default information about the switch and down here we have a little graph showing us some of the traffic in and out of the switch all very simple here on the home page so down the left-hand side you can see we have our column with all of our various layer 2 management options we've got port management vlan link aggregation all sorts down the side we can just click on these and have a little look we've got our vlans link aggregations so it looks like you can make six group six lag groups for this eight port switch that's really quite cool one thing that we are going to take a look at right away is port management we will see if we can do anything about uh this port number one that we tried to use for our link to my current switch aha so as we can see all of these ports are currently set to auto and if we go on the drop down we can indeed change the speed so each port has auto or 10 gig five gig 2.5 gig or one gig what's interesting is we can't actually do the drop down for the first four ports so if we look at the switch here we've got four ports these are the sfp plus ports and then we've got four rj45s all of the rj45s we can alter the speed um but we can't on the sfp plus ports which is interesting so for any of you that are curious as to why i'm looking at this right now the main reason is because in order to get my um my old switch chatting to an sfp plus port i had to manually drop the speed of the sfp plus port down to one gig and then it would communicate because it's only standard sfp ports on my switch i thought it may be a similar situation here but it turns out that you can only have these sfp plus ports on auto let's have a little look at the information here aha yeah it even says applies only to rj45 so you can't actually change the speed of the sfp plus port so that may mean that they're 10 gig only but i'm gonna have to check that out i'll have a quick look in the manual see if i can see anything um i may actually get in touch with qnap as well just to double check on that one but it looks like we can't drop these down to one gig manually you can't force them down to one gig so my little theory there is not going to work to get that link up and running but that's not a problem everything else is looking absolutely fine so very nice and basic clear to understand interface we've got general system settings down the bottom here all the things you'd expect to be able to change we can do a static ip here as well for the switch which is really nice uh all sorts of usual stuff firmware update options down here yeah really nice basic interface uh and log off log on let's just check that one more time yes perfect so we now have access to the switch that's great as you guys can see that couldn't be simpler really that is really really straightforward um and i think it's good to point out that we don't need to do anything with the switch to get this setup up and running it is it seems to be performing absolutely fine right out of the box so for my needs here we're not really going to need to adjust anything within the switch at least not straight away so that's great i'm really chuffed with how straightforward all of this is turning out to be so that is the quick look at the switch configuration and qss qnap switch system we've had a little kind of mini tour around there we won't delve into all of the features um but there we have it our switch is now up and running or it was up and running anyway but at least now we have access to it we've essentially kind of provisioned it i guess you can say because we now have our own little account and we can we can get on there so that's good i have just logged back on to gallifrey and it's brought up the help center again i'm gonna ask it not to do this but very handy if you do need a helping hand through this stuff there is a help center right here on the nas so um we're kind of sort of for the click around and figure it out ourselves team um but it is useful so we are now going to set up a user set up the privileges for the user figure out a couple more final little details and get this ready to actually try some editing to and from right now we are behaving as the admin user and the admin is essential for administration but for our day-to-day use we want a little bit more of a simplified user with access to less of the shares so particularly those default shares we don't really want to see those so if we take a look here within finder we're going to solve a couple of things today under network we'll notice that we've got gallifrey but we've also got gallifrey afp we'll sort that out and if we connect to gallifrey because we're connecting as the admin at the moment we can see all of these shares whereas really i only want to see my share that i actually created so that's not a problem at all let's go and figure out some of this stuff so if we launch control panel i think this is a good place to start to dive in and have a look at some of these settings we're going to go into network and file services because there is something that i want to disable on this particular nas we're going to come down to win mac slash nfs and this references back to that option that we selected earlier will you be using this nas with a mac a pc um and this is the settings that have been applied because of the answers that we gave now then we only really need to use one network protocol with this nas currently as you can see from finder we do have a couple of different network protocols set up and it's easy to tell because we have gallery listed here the one that we've connected to and we have gallifrey afp now afp stands for apple file protocol and i use afp extensively on my network but we don't need to use afp for this nas we can disable it because final cut pro although it's an apple application final cut pro doesn't rely on afp it relies on smb3 as the best protocol to use for editing over the network so i believe judging by the fact that this is labeled as afp i believe that this share that we're connected to is indeed the smb3 share now taking a look up here under the microsoft services coming into advanced options we can see that we do have smb3 enabled highest smb version smb3 or smp1 we can just leave that as it is because it will default to smb3 anyway we can come over and we can actually disable afp once we uncheck this box and we apply the settings we should see that afp disappear from our finder window so that will just help to streamline things a little bit more leaving it on is no problem at all but it may get confusing if you accidentally connect to that and then it's not working properly with final cut we only want to focus on smb so if we come back over into network you can see that we now only have gallifrey enabled so afp is not enabled so that's perfect for us now as i say not a problem but we only really want to focus on smb so it's confusing it's under the microsoft tab um but still that's the one we want nfs we don't have to worry about that anyway so that's all good so that's that's sorted next up we want to go back into control panel and we want to now create our appropriate user that we're going to be using to edit to and from the nas let's jump into users and we're going to add a new user looks like from the drop down here you can create multiple users at one time if you want to but we only need to create one user so just like creating a user account for anything we've got options for name and password and a little picture and everything so i'm just going to fill in these details so there's my basic information entered you can do some stuff with email down here send an email notification that's really cool we want to edit some of the folders that this user can and can't see so to do that we'll jump in here and we can currently see that for our active projects we don't have any access right now so we actually want read and write access to that one so it goes green when we go for read and write we don't want access to any of these other folders i'm not really going to use the public folder i'm not going to use any of them they can just sit there so that's fine the active projects folder the active project share is now read and write for our user there's also a deny column here so we can deny access to the public folder if we want but there's no real need i don't need to further configure this so we can just create that user and what i'm going to try and do now is log out of the admin account on my mac and we'll log into tom smith so i can still see all of this which is interesting i was expecting those to disappear so the only reason we're doing this is to try and make it a little less cluttered um let's try and edit this so i've just restarted my mac because i was relaunching finder to try and refresh things but it was still showing me exactly the same stuff so let's jump back in okay things have refreshed slightly better now i can actually see all of my servers i do find that this whole network portion of finder in big sur to be a little bit on the old buggy side um but we'll see if we can see those folders now it will be interesting we'll connect as tom smith okay we can still see all of those folders interesting because on my other systems as soon as you disallow access to those shares from the user account then you can't see them anymore but i'm guessing if we try and connect to any of these they're not going to work because that's what we've specified let's have a look yeah not going to work not gonna work not gonna work but the one that we have specified is right there so they still show up i'm gonna have one last go at trying to hide these default shares it's no big deal at all but i just want to see if i can do it now that i'm already down the rabbit hole so i'm gonna have a quick click around in the control panel here see if i can see anything so looking at the shares here in the control panel i can edit them and there is an option to hide them hide network drive now because we're using smb i think this should work all services will be temporarily suspended that's fine so you've got hidden no yes no no so let's hide all of these okay so that may have done the trick let's disconnect from gallifrey let's reconnect as tom smith and with a bit of luck boom there we go so we have our active projects folder we've got a home folder here we can't do anything with it it's not in this list there's a difference between homes and home it seems so not too sure there as i say new to qnap so not 100 sure but we've actually managed to achieve that now which is great worth noting as well if you do want to still connect to these shares you can hide them but you can still manually connect to them by entering the share so that's excellent so what i'm gonna do now is i am going to plop a final cut library onto our nas we are going to start doing things properly so on our active project share new and we are going to go libraries and we will take our little external ssd here which is the drive i've been using to edit all of my videos for a good few years now within the scratch we do have a march library do we not no we don't we do not so we're only just into march 8th of march so every project that i've got has been started in february so that's great what we'll do is we'll start a brand new march library on the nas and then i'll move my current project over to that new library so let's launch final cut pro so this is an event open here uh part one of our qnap series from the feb library we're gonna create the march library now typically what i do when i come into a new month is i'd create library and then i'd just come here and i'd make a new library and we'd be a way to go for the month but we're going to change that up a little bit now we're going to use our network share so let's choose gallifrey active projects libraries 2021 march and all of these ones that are dated and months and things like that they are my imnc libraries so that's the library created if we go over into our finder window we can see in libraries we now have a new library file now coming over here we can look at our storage locations and there are a couple of different options here so these are the four different areas in final cut where we can specify individual locations now we've got media motion content cache and backups the backups first we'll sort of go from the bottom up i guess backups final cut backups folder by default is always the local movies folder on your mac now i keep this as default because it's a very very small folder and all i do every now and again is i empty it and delete the backups it's not a problem at all it keeps the project backups completely separate from your working folder your library so it is then kind of a true backup of that project i'll actually show you that folder so if we take a little example and look at my edits here if we go back into scratch back into my february library you can see it's a big old library for the videos that i've made during feb and the videos that i'm currently making um however if we go down into movies we have a folder called final cut backups and you can see the backups for the different libraries but this entire folder is just over 200 megs so it's absolutely nothing for all of these months work so i just leave the backups on the system drive that isn't a problem at all next up is the motion templates for me i don't even use it so i don't need to change it motion templates there you can see stored in the folder again in the local movies folder cache is quite an important one at the moment you guys can see that it's stored in volumes active projects libraries because it's defaulted to store on the nas that's where our library is stored you can if you want store your cache locally you can store the cache locally and you can have your library on the nas that will speed things up but the only thing with that is you will have to consciously remember to clear that cache from your system drive it will go up and up and up in size but we are going to keep it in the library because i think this nas is quick enough to have the cache on the nas as well i believe the mass is a little bit quicker from what i've observed from my file transfers i believe it's a little bit quicker than my external ssd as it is so cache in library we're gonna roll with that for now we can always change it later and the final one is the media itself it's going to be stored in the library of course so these are all our storage locations we haven't needed to change any from default they're all just sitting there quite happily let's hit ok on that you get a little rundown of your locations here as well in the inspector that's great we will now move a project over to the naz and i think the first project that i'm going to move over is one that i haven't edited yet i've got this mac mini ssd replacement video i have a project i've got footage but i've got no edit at all the project is empty so i believe this video which is quite a lot of footage here because i was filming the entire time i was doing the upgrade i think what i'm gonna do is use this project as my first ever kind of guinea pig nas editing project i can give this a go later on in the week so let's move this over to the new library now if you're upgrading from your current storage solution to the nas and you want to move a library over or you want to move an event over specifically we've already created a new library you can move the entire library over as well that's fine you can just copy it over but to move the event we can just drag that over mac mini ssd upgrade into march include absolutely everything to be transferred over so we can see it's now copying the files over to the nas and i can actually tell that it's doing so as well because i can hear the drive spinning up behind me and copying that data over this is quite a lot of data for us to get an idea of what we're copying over unfortunately final cut isn't very descriptive in the background tasks window but we can get a rough idea by looking that up ourselves so to see how much it's copying over we can come over into scratch we can look at our february library and we can show the contents of this folder and we can come down into the video that we're talking about so the video in question is the mac mini ssd upgrade looking at the original media folder if we look at the size of that folder you guys can see that we're copying over 43 gigabytes over to the nas so that's what final cut is doing right now when it's finished copying that 43 gigs of data over we'll then be able to edit freely in this library and that'll be our first edit on this nas 100 done we are finished so i am now going to completely quit final cut because we are going to prove here that we have done everything correctly um by ejecting hyperspace this is my external ssd that i use to edit my videos let's relaunch final cut it's going to give us a couple of errors that it can't open libraries that were previously located on that other drive however what we will have is our library oh it's not even making a fuss about those libraries that's pretty cool so march is the only one that's been able to open this is the only one that we actually have stored here let's open the project we are now completely disconnected from the ssd so that means we're editing live from the nas so the first clip in that video you guys can't actually see my uh playback window here my viewer because it's on my second display but we don't really need to watch the video i just need to drag it into the timeline and see what it does so first clip drag into the timeline boom here we are video in the timeline scroll back and forth it's loading it up let's dump another clip dump another clip let's reduce the timeline have a little look scrub scrub scrub scrub scrub scrub scrub scrub okay and another one it's all here it's all here chop chop chop chop chop so let's just pretend we're chop chop make an edit make an edit bang yeah edit edit cut this together [Music] i can see all of this previewing by the way i tell you what let's just add all of these clips simultaneously drop those in reduce that okay so it's all doing its thing i'm going to play a little bit back my headphones on it's playing back it's playing back oh my gosh that feels identical maybe even a little bit better than my ssd that i've had connected via usb 3.0 it's only a little msata thing it's not the fastest thing in the world um so yes that is our first very non-scientific but quick kind of concept theory test here of the editing to and from this nas we actually have it set up now for anyone that may be slightly disappointed and thinking come on tom show us some real numbers get down to the nitty-gritty as well as setting this up and making it all pretty in part three in the rack the main thing that we're gonna do in part three i'm gonna run some proper numbers i'll do some comparison some real speed tests some real life world performance and we will see the differences in terms of numbers this part two here is all configuration it's all just me figuring out how to do this but i think this is a massive success as we go through this configuration process all of my questions are being answered and i now have the answer to the first question that popped up in this video and that is the connection between the two switches using this cable now i checked directly with qnap i asked the question because i noticed in the switches you guys saw that you couldn't manually assign speed to the sfp plus ports i wondered if they would only run a 10 gig they will drop down to one gig but you must use standard sfp one gig transceivers so this is a 10 gig sfp plus dac cable now with my other switch what i was able to do to get it chatting to my dream machine pro which within the dream machine pro i was able to drop that down from 10 gig to one gig it wouldn't work as an auto assign i had to manually set it to one gig fdx and then it worked i've been doing a little bit of forum searching and a lot of people a lot of users if they have one of these switches the non-pro versions with only the sfp ports a lot of people have trouble getting those ports talking to different pieces of equipment because they're sfp ports and it's a complete pain so we're not going to be able to get this up and running i'm pretty sure this is not going to work i'm not going to waste any more time on it because there's nothing much i can really do i've looked at it on the qnap switch side i can't do anything there as you guys saw there's nothing to be done because if i was plugging the correct cable into the qnap then it would just work anyway on the other side on my standard switch that i've had for ages there's nothing that's showing up there it's just a completely dead port i can't do anything with it it's a one gig port anyway so i can't adjust the speed so we are gonna just leave it with rj45 we have four rj45 ports to play with on the qnap switch and that will work out for us completely fine lovely another question answered we've got it straight from the horse's mouth they will work with one gig but you need the right stuff one huge benefit to editing locally is the simplicity one of the things that makes it so simple is the fact that the files are always there for you so every time you turn on your mac as long as the storage is connected to the machine all the files in the libraries and the projects that you were working on last time will be there for you straight away you just have to launch final cut and anything you were working on last time just springs back to life and you can begin working on it instantly this is just a process that we don't think about because it's common practice you switch on your computer and any locally connected disks will just mount straight away it's something that we've all become accustomed to now with a server or a network share it's a little bit different you physically have to tell your machine to mount that share so that you can begin working on it now if i shut down my mac right now i'm connected to my active project share right here so i can launch final cut if i want to i can begin working on anything here straight away that's not a problem but as soon as i shut down my mac and turn my machine back on if i then launch final cut it'll be empty nothing will be there because i physically have to reconnect to this share to do this every single time you want to edit is a little bit inconvenient to say the least because like i've demonstrated in this video a good way to connect is just to come into network click on the server then you've got to connect wait for it to load then you've got to click on your share and whatever you're connected so that's a little bit time consuming a little bit of a quicker way is you can just press command k from your keyboard when you're on your desktop within finder here and you can connect to any one of the service on your network and you can select a share and you can go from there this dialog is also great for a really quick reference as to whether you're connected to an afp or an smb share by the way so that plays into where we were last time you can see that i do have an smb share for gallifrey as well as the older afp share that we disabled but still that's an extra step that you've got to remember to do prior to launching final cut and it's just a little bit of a pain now we can replicate the behavior of locally attached storage by telling the machine to mount these drives or rather to connect to these network shares when we start up the machine and it's really easy to do this and you've all probably used this feature without knowing it anyway so we go into users and groups within system preferences and over here under the login items tab this is typically where you drag any application that you want to boot up when you load your machine so if you always want messages to come up you pop messages in here and that app opens by default pretty standard stuff but one really cool feature is you don't just have to add applications to this list you can add pretty much anything one of those things being the network share so we can go into gallifrey we can click on the share that we want to automatically mount we can add it and it is now in that list that means when i restart my mac or i turn my mac on for the first time that morning it will reconnect the share and as long as we are connected we can launch final cut and we can begin editing now this brings me on to my next point by default these days mac os does not show shares on the desktop i don't believe from a fresh install you don't get all of your options showing on the desktop you may get uh you get external dvds and usb and stuff i don't think you get connected servers on by default so i do recommend coming up to finder preferences and just enabling all of this stuff one of the lovely simplistic things about the mac from day one for me has been the fact that anything connected to your machine whether it's an internal hard drive external usb drive dvd network share they all just appear on the desktop and i think that's really convenient so i always enable all of these options as soon as i get a new mac or i do a fresh install that way you can then see that the share has been connected too so when you turn on your mac there will be a little bit of a delay then it'll connect to the share and you'll be good to go you can then launch final cut and carry on editing from where you left off if you do have hard drives in your nas which you most likely will do just like i have here there will be a little time where the drives have got to spin up so if your nas hasn't been doing much for the past little while and the drives have spun down the nas will have to come to life you will then need to wait to be connected but it's much more convenient doing that than actually clicking through the process and remembering to do it yourselves so that's one cool little tip and that just lets us edit as soon as we switch our machine on you'll notice behind me that i've got a new kind of little setup going here this is not permanent this is a temporary solution using a bit of furniture that i had going spare i needed to get the printer back up here on the rack so in order to have the nas and the printer all stacked up together i needed to plop that there i'm not crazy about the way it looks but i don't have a better solution for now because this is a desktop nas it's not going to go in my rack it'll take up at least five view of space i don't have the space to dedicate to it so it's going to have to be outside here somewhere and i need to figure out how i'm going to juggle all this gear around where i'm going to put it do i need to buy an additional piece of furniture or i need to think about all that i've got some ideas but that's not the main thing i want to talk about here in the outro what i want to tell you guys right now is something so cool i've just jumped off the edit of this very video part two the video that you're watching right now i've just this second come off the edit and i've edited the last three quarters of this video on the qnap nas after doing the introduction in the first little section i transferred the library because of course after we configured it it was ready to rock so i transferred the library over to the qnap and the last three quarters of the video i've been editing to and from this nas which has been incredible it's been a buttery smooth experience and up to this point the library is just under 200 gigs i think it's 190 something gigabytes so it's not a small project by any means quite a large project especially for me i rarely exceed 200 gigs in one video project for imnc and this is just chewing through all of it really speedy really happy now i'm not going to show you any numbers in this part two i haven't done any tests i've only just edited a video and kind of assessed what it feels like but i haven't run the raw numbers i need to take a look and do all that for you guys ready for part three i am really interested to see just how quick this guy is on paper because it feels great and i was expecting to jump into the configuration another three or four times and tweak this and tweak that i've always had this kind of association with 10 gig and fiddling and tweaking and stuff but no i've just plugged it in switched it on press the buttons that i thought were the correct ones to press and we are up and running with a really speedy network now of course i'm not saying that the configuration that i've put in place is perfect and it's very early days still but over the next few days i'm going to be hammering this guy and in preparation for part three especially will really put it through its paces to see what it can do so that's a good place to wrap up i think i'll show you guys all of the stuff that we've got left we'll tie up all of the loose ends in part three i really hope you've enjoyed this part to the configuration of this equipment it's been great fun and i'm so glad that the project is going this well hopefully you'll all be able to join me in part three as well so thank you so much for watching and i'll see you all next time [Music] you

Channel: ItsMyNaturalColour

Views: 18,989

Keywords: IMNC, ItsMyNaturalColour, QNAP, NAS, Storage, Network, Home Network, Video Editing, 10G, 10Gbps, 10gig ethernet, ethernet, 10 gigabit ethernet networking, Switch, Switching, 10g switch, review, upgrade, expansion, server, QNAP TS-h973AX-8G, QNAP QSW-M804-4C, WD Red Pro 10 TB 3.5 Inch NAS Internal Hard Drive, WD Red 500 GB NAS SSD, Western Digital, SSD, HDD, Hard Drive, 4k, 1080p, Video Editing Network Setup

Id: I6aA9nkkbTk

Length: 69min 8sec (4148 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021