Sharing Storage

Hey everyone,

I recently started working for a new marketing company as a videographer/motion graphics artist. I'm now the second person on the video side of things (we are a small company). We have been trying to think of solutions for how we will share content between the two of us. We have external hard drives, but none that allow us to both connect and share data. We have been using Resolve Studio, and are aware of the collaborative features, but we need solutions in terms of hardware.

We want to be able to store footage/projects and work off of the same storage solution. It may be a situation where I cut on my personal work computer, and then we go to our computer that we use to finalize the project, without going into too many details.

Anyway, wondering if you have any suggestions. We don't have a massive budget, so just trying to get an idea of some possible solutions.

Thanks!
Ryan

10GbE NAS

10GbE NAS

Thanks for replying. Will look at this.

Hi Ryan,
I work for a pretty small creative department too; 1 video editor (me), 1 graphic designer, 1 project manager and a director. We have some interns and freelancers that are also occasionally in helping out.

We bought a Thunderbolt QNAP TVS-871T with 8x 6tb drives about 18 months ago. It's setup as RAID-6 so we get about 32TB of usable space. I'm connected via thunderbolt, and everyone else connects over 1gbe (but it does support 10gbe as well), and it's been great. I get about 500-600 mb/s and have edited a few multicam URSA mini 4.6k ProRes projects as well as a Red Epic project without any issues.

We were pretty close to filling it up so we just bought an expansion with another 32TB, which is another thing I like that it can upgraded relatively easily. In case anyone is wondering, we backup to Backblaze online.

You'll have to do a little DIY networking, but their prices are pretty good. I'd expect to spend probably somewhere around $5k for a setup like this.

Anyways, that's just what we do, there might be better options out there now than there was last year, but thought it might be helpful.

Rey

Yes, this has been a problem in my business for a long time now and we're looking at installing a NAS system from the likes of QNAP, Synology or similar. Buy as many slots as you can and the highest-capacity NAS-compatible HDDs (eg: WD Reds) as you can because you'll fill it up quickly no matter how much networked storage you have!

Yes, this has been a problem in my business for a long time now and we're looking at installing a NAS system from the likes of QNAP, Synology or similar. Buy as many slots as you can and the highest-capacity NAS-compatible HDDs (eg: WD Reds) as you can because you'll fill it up quickly no matter how much networked storage you have!

Thanks for the info!

Yes, this has been a problem in my business for a long time now and we're looking at installing a NAS system from the likes of QNAP, Synology or similar. Buy as many slots as you can and the highest-capacity NAS-compatible HDDs (eg: WD Reds) as you can because you'll fill it up quickly no matter how much networked storage you have!

I was very surprised: a couple of months ago, Best Buy had a sale of cheap WD 8TB external consumer drives in junk USB3 enclosures. A local DP who's a casual friend of mine discovered that inside were WD Red enterprise-class drives with a 256GB cache. I replaced the 8 drives in my RAID5 with these new cheap drives ($150 each), and the thing really flies -- I think I got nearly 10% better performance over the 3TB drives that were in their before, and more than doubled my capacity. I'm definitely a fan of the WD Reds.

Allow me to flog a dead horse once more...

If you are using RAID 5 with high capacity disks that are specced for one URE in 10^14, you are probably guaranteeing that your array will fail to rebuild after replacing a disk. For 8x 8TB drives in RAID 5, which is a configuration I've seen become pretty common, I'd say it's 99% the array will fail to rebuild. Your odds will improve a lot if you use drives rated for one URE in 10^15, but that requires serious enterprise drives like the WD Golds.

Really?
How long does 8x8TB RAID 5 rebuild? Day, 2, 3?
You have to be very unlucky to have 2nd failure before raid is rebuild.

Really?
How long does 8x8TB RAID 5 rebuild? Day, 2, 3?
You have to be very unlucky to have 2nd failure before raid is rebuild.

Rebuild time depends on how much the controller can dedicate to it, but it will be painfully slow (days) compared to RAID 10. Restoring from backup could be faster even, depending on your infrastructure.

The point is that no, you do not need to be unlucky to encounter a second failure with 10^14 disks before the array rebuilds. Quite the opposite: with these disks, it is almost a statistical certainty. The second disk will not totally die like the first may have, but you will almost inevitably have at least one error, and that means lost data, period. Whether or not that data is valuable is up to chance. Just another reason we say RAID is not a backup.

At my current work we run 12x8TB disks as RAID6- almost 3 years now and not a single problem. All drives good so far.
At my last place we had 24x2TB running for 6 years or so on non-enterpise drives. 1 disk died over this time and we never lost any data. RAID was used constantly and stressed quite heavily.
Based on your stats I should already have lost data

At my current work we run 12x8TB disks as RAID6- almost 3 years now and not a single problem. All drives good so far.
At my last place we had 24x2TB running for 6 years or so on non-enterpise drives. 1 disk died over this time and we never lost any data. RAID was used constantly and stressed quite heavily.
Based on your stats I should already have lost data

As long as your array doesn't lose a disk, it doesn't matter, since the risk is in the rebuild process. Higher spindle count of lower capacity drives is also less dangerous to rebuild. Do keep in mind I'm not saying you'll lose the whole array, or even a whole disk. It's almost certain you'd lose at least one sector, though, and if that sector includes something important, bad news.