I have a small NAS. It started as a project to replace the HDDs in my main PC, but now I’m becoming more interested in it and increasingly dependent on it.
I currently have a small NAS with two 1TB HDDs in a mirrored configuration at 1Gbps, but I’d like to do a major upgrade. I’m a photographer and I edit high-bitrate videos, so I’m going to upgrade my entire network to 10Gbps and have four 4TB WD Red or Ironwolf HDDs in RAID 1 (I think it’s the equivalent of RAID 5). However, this won’t be enough to saturate the network; it will only reach around 500MB/s. I thought about using an NVMe cache, either 500GB or 1TB, but I’ve been reading that L2ARC isn’t the best option unless it’s for files that are constantly being read, which isn’t my case. Besides, it messes up RAM usage, so sometimes it’s even better to invest in more RAM for ARC (I don’t know if that would help), but with current prices, I’ll only be able to fit 32GB at most if I don’t buy an SSD. And if I do buy an SSD, I’ll only be able to use 16GB of RAM.
What would be the best option? I know Synology allows it, it’s easier, but it’s very expensive, and I already have the hardware, so I won’t even spend money on that, just on storage drives.
Editing high bitrate video on HDDs over the network suffers not only from low bandwith, but also from low IOPS and a high latency compared to local storage on a NVME.
To counter that you would need to invest big money into an all flash NAS or multiple mirrors of HDDs…and you will still be multiple times slower than 1 local NVME.
EDIT: Raidz1 has the IOPS of 1 HD… welcome to the 90ies
IMO, if you are the only editor, you shouldn’t bother to edit the footage over the network. It’s just not worth it. @Farout explained why.
Also, I recommend watching some videos of youtuber SpaceRex. He (states that he) consults photographers/videographers much. And usually he looks at the NAS/ZFS from the media creators’ PoV, contrarily to the others who look at the topic as homelabbers with VMs and similar workloads.
I agree with the others, editing on a NAS share is likely to be too slow. Simply copy to local disk any photo, and when done, upload to the NAS.
In fact, using a high speed NVMe on your PC for photo editing might be a better choice. Then simply use the NAS for both storage of the photos and a place to make backups from.
If you really need high performance writes to your NAS, you could create a manual write cache. (ZFS’ write cache is only in memory.) Basically, use a NVMe drive pool on the NAS as the first layer write, from your PC to the NAS. Then, either have a background task move the file to the HDD pool. Or manually do so later. Most busy people don’t do well with this type of complicated setup. So, it is understandable if you want to avoid it.
PS: The ZFS equivalent to RAID-5 is known as RAID-Z1. RAID-6 would be RAID-Z2.
