NAS system for 4K video editing

Hi,

I tried to use my Synology DS218Play for video storage to use for editing with Resolve 17 but it is waaaaaay too slow at 127MB/s Write and 154.5MB/s Read speeds. What transfer speeds are needed to edit 4K RAW videos recorded with a Blackmagic 4K Pocket Cinema Camera? Or in other words, what NAS systems are recommended or are the minimal requirement for the job?

Thank you in advance

the Synology DS218 Play is a $229 consumer NAS system, that does not even support Plex server, least not a professional vidoe application like Davinci Resolve. Blackmagic now makes the Cloud Store product line, and the current 2 products that are available are the Cloud Store Mini, which is 8 TB of flash storage for $2995, and the Cloud Pod, which will give you limited NAS features, and you provide your own thunderbolt or USB-C drives, and this is $395.

Of course, there are plenty of NAS systems on the market from QNAP, Synology, Asustor and others, that will all allow you to have NAS functions for shared storage and remote access, but they don't cost $229. What can you get for $229, so you can do 4K editing ? NOTHING. If you are a single user, and want a small QNAP, you would get a QNAP TS-h886 with 6 matching 7200 RPM SATA drives, and the 10G card. Without a 10G interface on your computer, you will not be doing 4K editing. With a Synology, you would purchase the DS1621xs+, and provide 6 matching 7200 RPM drives. And of course, the Cloud Store Mini will perform great as well, but it's only 8 TB of storage.

If you can't afford any of this, then I suggest that you just get a standard thuderbolt drive to do direct attached storage. The only reason to choose a NAS system - be it Blackmagic Cloud Store, QNAP, Synology, etc. is because you want shared storage for multiple computers, and remote access and the ability to sync to cloud sites. If you feel that a product like the Synology DS218 was the "right purchase" because it was cheap - well, you have already found out, that it will not work for you.

Bob Zelin

What transfer speeds are needed to edit 4K RAW videos recorded with a Blackmagic 4K Pocket Cinema Camera?

If you aren't talking about a lot of footage, many people are using Samsung T5/T7 SSDs or similar. If your editing is fairly straightforward, 7200RPM eternal hard disk drives should be OK too. The price of Samsung T5 and T7 SSDs is now so close* that the somewhat faster T7 is the better option of the two.

* Note that I'm talking about the standard T7 without the fingerprint security feature.

The speed difference between the T5 and the T7 is pretty much negligible, at least according to BM's speed test on my machine. They both perform just shy of 400 MB/s. But if you plan any double use of such an SSD for a camera, don't buy the T7, it won't work. BTW, sometimes I found the T7 even cheaper for the same capacity.
If you need more speed and you have a computer with Thunderbolt, I'd get an Acasis enclosure and a Samsung 980 Pro MVMe, that'll be really fast around 2.8 GB/s writing and 2.7 reading. But, of course, that's more pricey.

BTW, Rob, nice typo: "7200RPM eternal hard disk drives".
Where can I buy these?

The speed difference between the T5 and the T7 is pretty much negligible, at least according to BM's speed test on my machine. They both perform just shy of 400 MB/s. But if you plan any double use of such an SSD for a camera, don't buy the T7, it won't work. BTW, sometimes I found the T7 even cheaper for the same capacity.
If you need more speed and you have a computer with Thunderbolt, I'd get an Acasis enclosure and a Samsung 980 Pro MVMe, that'll be really fast around 2.8 GB/s writing and 2.7 reading. But, of course, that's more pricey.

BTW, Rob, nice typo: "7200RPM eternal hard disk drives".
Where can I buy these?

Your hard disk drives aren't eternal? One of those rare occasions when spell-checker came up with an amusing substitution

The Blackmagic Disk Speed app gives me meaningfully better speeds on my T7 SSDs than on my T5s. See below. However, as you say only the T5 can be used as onboard storage when filming with a Blackmagic camera.

Uli and I had a fairly detailed exchange about Do-It-Yourself enclosures and the Samsung 980 Pro NVMe on the first page of a recent thread called Help! Choosing a Computer.

There's also a current MacRumors thread that has a lot of information about using NVMe SSDs as external drives, and the discussion applies equally to Windows computers: Thunderbolt 4 & NVMe M.2 External Storage: Read & Write Speeds. For the purpose of this discussion, there's no difference between Thunderbolt 3 and 4. There's also some discussion about Samsung's T5/T7 SSDs in that thread.

The Blackmagic Disk Speed result below is from a test that I just ran on a 2TB Samsung T7, using 5GB as the load on the drive. The read and write speeds are quite a bit higher than what I get with a 1TB T5. I don't have a 2TB T5, so I can't compare using the same storage size, but I doubt that it makes a significant difference. I did this test on a Mac. I can't vouch for the accuracy, but I've read that some Windows computers have somewhat faster read and write speeds for these drives.

Getting back to @Charles1969's original question - What transfer speeds are needed to edit 4K RAW videos recorded with a Blackmagic 4K Pocket Cinema Camera? - this is plenty fast enough. The Samsung 2TB T7 currently sells in the US for $220, which according to Amazon price tracker CamelCamelCamel is its lowest price ever. The 2TB T5 is only $10 cheaper.

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