Hi everyone ! I’m new to this forum but I’ve been reading quite a few threads lately when they popped in my various google searches, so I thought I’d post here because I’m looking for expert advice and technical clarifications on a few points. Sorry for the long post, and thanks in advance to anyone helping !
I would say I’m tech saavy but I’m not an expert when it comes to NASes, or networking, although I like to learn new skills and don’t mind diving into technical stuff, so bare with me / please correct me if I use the wrong terms or say something stupid. I’ve built and fixed computers in my life, including Hackintoshes so I like to nerd around, to some extent… 
THE GOAL :
- to build a system for 3 sound editors working on film and tv shows on Pro Tools (myself included), fast enough because we would love to work directly off the NAS, not looking for a backup only option, altough I’m considering having a second (slower?) storage pool on the same system for mid term archival (projects we might need to
This is important for us because we’ll regularly work on the same projects using the same source material. That’s convenient for us and we’d also use the server to share a common sound library we’re constantly accessing and copying files from. - something durable and reliable, running almost 24/7 with relatively low maintenance
- trying to stay away from Synology because I don’t like the fact that they are trying to enforce their customers to use their own proprietary drives, and I wouldn’t be here otherwise
TECHNICAL INFO :
- the NAS will be on a 10GbE network connected to 3x Mac Studio with 10GbE ports, please don’t suggest using Windows, we just won’t. I love Windows but just not for audio work.
- we would love to get 30 to 40TB of usable storage
- I’m considering building the NAS myself with server components, 64GB of ECC memory, a nice CPU, possibly redudant PSU ?
- in our field of work we do have to deal with relatively large files, nothing like 4K video footage or things like that but a film/serie folder often ends up somewhere between 1 to 2 TB
- for example my Audio Files (the folder with files Pro Tools constantly access and write to) folder in my current project weights 60ish GB and the weight of the individual files varies from 100KB to a few GB per file, with the average being in dozens of MB probably)
- the point above makes me hesitate between protocols and which one would be more suitable
- we don’t need top of the line/llightning fast transfer speeds, as long as we could get between 400-500MB/s to a GB/s for large files transfer, I would be more than happy, less than 400MB/s average I would be dissapointed ahah.
WHAT I’M CONSIDERING/WHAT I HEARD/READ ONLINE :
- 1st choice : using SMB because from my understanding it’s the most broadly supported / easy to work with protocol, fast for large files transfer
- 2nd choice : NFS, from my testings and what I’ve read it seems to be faster for transferring lots of small files
- someone told me I should look into iSCSI , they mentioned DDP or other SAN setups, because it’s faster etc, but I think that wouldn’t work since we want multiple clients to access the same volume simultaneously, which from my understand is very complicated if not impossible with iSCSI, right ?
- iSCSI seems to be a bit tricky to be honest, also the choice of initiators on macOS is not optimal, and seems outdated/very niche for some reason
- i’m not considering AFP for obvious reasons
- i’m thinking of periodic snapshots to USB as a backup solution
QUESTIONS ? :
- what protocol do you think would work the best and why ? I’m also trying to understand why
- what kind of drives array would you recommend ? HDDs ? SATA SSDs ? NVMe ?
- would I get fast enough transfers/high enough IOPS with HDDs ?
- does dedicated caching drive(s) make sense in our usecase ? I think that in the first place lot of RAM is more important before considering caching
- RAIDZ1 , Z2 ?
I may forget something but let’s start here !
Thanks,
Axel