FAO Synology NASists / FAO Beany

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KiwiDave
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FAO Synology NASists / FAO Beany

Post by KiwiDave »

I'm starting to look at updating my home PC and also looking at upgrading the NAS boxes I have. Wanting the PC itself to run quiet as a silent thing so among all the cooling options I'm also looking at running only SSD inside it, which could be quite an expense if I mirror what I currently run (OS drive, scratch/catalogue drive, Documents drive, data drive and then an 8TB archive drive).

The alternative is to run not much in the way of drives internally and try and run storage for that archive particularly via a pimped up NAS box. My current Synology NAS are pretty vanilla 4 bay efforts, one of which is now old enough I can't run the latest DSM software on it. I've noticed you can pimp up the NAS with faster network cards, more RAM and an SSD which I think is for caching most recent files, and in theory that might help with some of my needs. I don't know anyone who's done this in practice though - what are the real world benefits of the various pimping options?

If it helps the current logic for the drives in the PC are as below:

OS - obvious
Scratch/Catalogue - Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere seem to run better with their respective scratch and catalogues kept separately from the data being worked on.
Documents - As expected really, this is < 1TB and contains all the day-to-day stuff I use an access. Been debating mirroring this up to a cloud account.
Data - Basically the current year's images, video and audio - traditionally always best worked on with data local on the machine due to how the apps work but if you believe the hype, some big video editing houses work onto networked files instead. Haven't seen much mention of anyone doing that with image files though.
Archive - Everything, ever. Also lives in a single home so that single catalogues and search can run over it. Currently at 7.5TB and will obviously rise over time.

Any thoughts and experience here welcome. TIA. 8-)
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dinny_g
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Re: FAO Synology NASists / FAO Beany

Post by dinny_g »

Breany doesn’t work for free anymore Dave!!

He’ll want paying… :lol:
JLv3.0 wrote: Thu Jun 21, 2018 4:26 pm I say this rarely Dave, but listen to Dinny because he's right.
Rich B wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 1:57 pm but Dinny was right…
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Sundayjumper
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Re: FAO Synology NASists / FAO Beany

Post by Sundayjumper »

You have an 8TB archive drive inside your main PC ? Putting that on a NAS in a cupboard is a quick win for sure. No point buying an SSD for that.

Beyond that I don’t know what throughput you’d be needing for your day to day work to store it external from the main machine. IIRC a 1 gig LAN connection has a limit of ~100MB per second. Better quality NAS units have multiple LAN connections that can run in parallel but that obviously requires your machine to have the same for it to be any use. Same with 10 gig networking.

Maybe that’s an answer. A direct 10Gb line from your machine to a nice chunky NAS, and regular 1Gb network for everything else.
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Beany
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Re: FAO Synology NASists / FAO Beany

Post by Beany »

KiwiDave wrote: Thu May 19, 2022 11:31 pm I'm starting to look at updating my home PC and also looking at upgrading the NAS boxes I have. Wanting the PC itself to run quiet as a silent thing so among all the cooling options I'm also looking at running only SSD inside it, which could be quite an expense if I mirror what I currently run (OS drive, scratch/catalogue drive, Documents drive, data drive and then an 8TB archive drive).

The alternative is to run not much in the way of drives internally and try and run storage for that archive particularly via a pimped up NAS box. My current Synology NAS are pretty vanilla 4 bay efforts, one of which is now old enough I can't run the latest DSM software on it. I've noticed you can pimp up the NAS with faster network cards, more RAM and an SSD which I think is for caching most recent files, and in theory that might help with some of my needs. I don't know anyone who's done this in practice though - what are the real world benefits of the various pimping options?

If it helps the current logic for the drives in the PC are as below:

OS - obvious
Scratch/Catalogue - Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere seem to run better with their respective scratch and catalogues kept separately from the data being worked on.
Documents - As expected really, this is < 1TB and contains all the day-to-day stuff I use an access. Been debating mirroring this up to a cloud account.
Data - Basically the current year's images, video and audio - traditionally always best worked on with data local on the machine due to how the apps work but if you believe the hype, some big video editing houses work onto networked files instead. Haven't seen much mention of anyone doing that with image files though.
Archive - Everything, ever. Also lives in a single home so that single catalogues and search can run over it. Currently at 7.5TB and will obviously rise over time.

Any thoughts and experience here welcome. TIA. 8-)
Broadly speaking, for archiving purposes you won't need 10gb NIC - even if you're throwing around 20gb files, you're still talking the different between three minutes of waiting for it to copy to the local PC, vs about 20-30 secs or so realistically, and that would involve getting 10GB NICs for the PC and the NAS which still aren't exactly cheap. If you were talking about using the NAS as a scratch setup, that'd be different, and require significantly more consideration...

Running the archive ('cold' data) off to the NAS makes a lot of sense - you can use various tools to set up synchronising between the desktop and the NAS for the archive so that it only moves changed files (I think the Synology Drive client will do it), and once you've got the initial transfer done, updates won't be too terrifying timewise - just set the 'update archive' tool (be that Syno Drive or some other tool) and get a cup of tea at the end of the day.

Running 'hot/warm' data off the NAS can be more of a pain thanks to how applications run them - on Mac OS or Linux this is less of an issue, but still an issue - on Windows it can be a full on fucking nightmare. I recall one client many moons ago having to rebuild their entire Lightroom library - nearly a terabyte - and it took days - as it had to put it's own config files in each folder etc. So perhaps just move the archive/cold data.

A 4 bay NAS (perhaps a used 2018 year device) and a brace of 10TB drives in Synology Hybrid RAID would probably be fine for a few more years, at which point you can start saving for a six or eight disk device, and you can start looking at native 10gb networked computers and NAS devices, and a switch - by that point they shouldn't be as pricy as they are now.

I'd also suggest seeing what the max ram is each NAS device can take - it might not make a huge difference, but it'll make a difference in some manner.

A bit 'broad' but while I'm used to Synos, I generally just use them for basic file storage and running my email domain (and even that's going to Google sometime soon) so don't take my word as gospel :lol:

My suggestion would be to see how many SSDs you can fit in your desktop.

use, for example
2x 256gb in RAID 1 for operating system
1 x 512gb SSD for scratch (the extra NAND will improve performance)
2 x 2TB SSD in RAID 1 for 'warm' work - stuff that's being worked on regularly, but not quite ready for archiving and can't afford to be lost on a day to day basis (unlike the scratch data)

Then at the end of the day, synchronise the 'warm' folder with the archive on the NAS.

In all seriousness, you might want to speak to someone local and show them your workflow, from start to finish, and what devices you already have - you might be able to re-use some bits, refresh others with just some new disks, etc - that's far, far easier to work out 'in the metal' than it is remotely :D
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KiwiDave
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Re: FAO Synology NASists / FAO Beany

Post by KiwiDave »

Appreciate the comments, thank you.

SJ - already have the NAS, essentially operating as a mirror of what's in the actual PC and providing backup etc. Was more thinking of as I upgrade the PC itself, instead of paying a fortune to have heaps of SSDs in the box, whether setting the NAS up to run well enough as the 'hot' storage instead was the better move.

Beany's comments make it sound more like keeping drives in the machine might be the way to go, but ultimately, also right in the sense that maybe I need to sit down with a geek at a store here and work it through.

Cheers for the feedback. :)
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