Blackmagic Forum

I saw a review of a NAS drive where the person mentioned being able to edit 4K where the files are stored on a NAS drive. What are your experience with editing Davinci Resolve 4Koff a NAS drive? I would have thought that the bottleneck would be the speed of the spinning HDD drives. Does the CPU and RAM of the NAS drive somehow make it feasible to edit 4K when the footage is stored on a NAS?

(My scenario is a single user, and not a multi-user setup).

Not all NAS drives are created equally. We have an SNS EVO at one facility that will do 4K ARRI raw because it has a ton of disks and a big flash cache. A smaller array of spinning disks can do pretty good sustained read/writes, but you can run into disk latency issues.

Also the data connection to your computer will matter. 4K blackmagic braw footage at 3:1 compression has a bit rate of over 180 MB/S. If your footage file size is greater than your memory, to keep up the computer will constantly pull data from your NAS and move it to memory or the drive you designated as as the cache (make sure it’s a SSD or M.2 drive that is not too full). If the NAS is connected by a gigabit network line, it will be too slow. Thunderbolt 2 & 3, usb 3.1 and 10Gb are the best choices right now. Many new NAS boxes have either Thunderbolt 2-3 or the ability to add a 10gb network card. Keep in mind that if you use a 10gb connection, the longest you want to go is about 6 feet with a copper wire because it will get too hot. If the NAS needs to be further away (they can be loud), the you will need to use fiber

rsf123 wrote:I saw a review of a NAS drive where the person mentioned being able to edit 4K where the files are stored on a NAS drive. What are your experience with editing Davinci Resolve 4Koff a NAS drive?

My experience is that NAS's are slow compared to a directly-connected RAID5. We have four different RAID5's, and they're all well over 1000MB/s; most of the NAS's we've seen are maybe 250-300MB/s. That might still be fast enough, but you'd have to run the Blackmagic Speed Test utility to know for sure.