I rarely comment on any video here on KZfaq but that was insane. Super informative. It answered all the questions in my mind about how I should setup a NAS system of my own. Thank you Alex 🙏

Hi Alex. Following your advice relating to this NAS, I did a lot of research which confirmed that this unit it still up to date in the market despite all the announcements which have been made in the past year. It is definitely not cheap once loaded with 9 drives, but I decided to buy one because your were so enthusiastic about it. I do not have any regrets at all. Using a 10GbE switch from QNAP to connect a 2019 MacBook Pro to it with a OWC Thunderbolt 3 adapter, I get very fast connection and the unit performs very well. It is so snappy ! Thanks for making such a good and truthful review. I am using it with QuTS Hero 5 and I set up all the necessary security measures to avoid being hacked. I am so happy 😊

Hey Alex, thank you so much for this video!! You basically first described all the problems our new found production company is facing right now and then solved them. With a team of 4 Editors and normally 2 people working on the same project, this seems to be exactly what we need. I also watched the other video about upgrading your network to 10Gbit and that's also what we gonna do. You just saved my day since Ive been looking into this stuff for over a week now without proper results. Im also definitely not an IT Freak but you explained everything so well. Thank you so much man and keep up the great work! All Love from Berlin!

Since you are a professed Newbee to NAS I commend you for going full speed (after proper research) ahead to resolving your storage needs first then realizing that you have a new work horse at your finger tips. I am a retired IT pro and shoot mainly photography (dancers) with some instructional and demo videos. I bought a QNAP dual drive in 2020 (8TB total) and shut down my (aging out) 2014 WD MyCloud Drive 2TB system. I utilize 2 external drives (4TB & 2TB) attached to the USB port via a Hub to provide backup vs RAID 0 or 1. Rock on and get that 10GB network online.

Well done, Sir! I thoroughly enjoyed the video. You did a great job with your presentation.

Alex, I’m new but now subscribe. The information you’ve imparted here is impressive, but not only that, you’re very clear and concise in a educative way. Just wanted to say thanks. watching this video was a big help and just what i’ve been looking for. 👏👍

Amazing video my man! Really informative, thanks for your effort!

EXACTLY what I was looking for!!! Liked & Subscribed!!! Great Job!!! DEFINITELY want to see you do a remote editing session with your NAS. I’m SURE I’ll be emailing you to help me set mine up!!!

Class video mate, really informative!

Thank you. I am definitely looking forward to more NAS and 10 Gig switch content. For video workflows!!

Great video. Looking forward to seeing your upgraded system video.

English, Data! I have no idea what you just said and yet I understand. Thanks! It was very informative.

Thanks Alex that was incredibly informative . Happy new Year and all the best for 2024!

"Get into KZfaq" they said, "it will be fun and easy"...... So I had a second hand laptop 2 years ago. Now I have an Intel i9 with RTX 3070, Davinci Resolve 17 Studio.... Upgraded my broadband from 60gb to 300gb. and now you come along and blow my mind!! Thanks.

Finally! Thanks so much for making this video! I’ve wanted to add a NAS to our home network for years, but the information out there has either not been relevant to my use case, or has felt like I need to get a degree in computer science to understand. Now that we’re about to undertake a full retrofit of our new home, the place will be wired with Cat6a throughout for up to 10Gb/s, but mostly running AVB between a music teaching space and a garden studio over 1Gb network. So I can see a similar NAS setup to this, in an under-stairs switch cupboard, working perfectly for our backup, sample libraries and media sharing 😀 Btw, browsing your other videos, are you in south Essex? If you are, howdy neighbour! Hope you’re enjoying Christmas and have great New Year!

This is the best review of this NAS model.

The video I've been looking for. Thank you!

Thank you, I’ll definitely consider set up one of these since I’m so fed up with dozens hard drives all around and every time wasting time to look for some old projects when old customers show up…

I remember you from the days of Periscope. A pioneer, really, in that genre. So glad I found your channel! Excellent video! Wishing you the Best on KZfaq and seeing your future projects. -Kat

Best NAS video on KZfaq. Cheers!

Good video..so as you have 60 terabytes of storage in mechanical drives, don't beleive anyone who tells you that mechanical drives will become obsolete soon. This really demonstrate that it still will be with us for a very long time.

This is a great video, and it's amazing to see a NAS using the kind of setup that was once confined to datacenters (e.g. ZFS pools w/ SSD and NVMe). Two questions: are you using the JBOD strictly as a daisy-chained NAS extender? I saw that QNAP offers the option of single-disk mode which could be useful for swapping in drives and using it as a big standalone external enclosure, but the formatting options to do that and also extend the NAS seem more limited, especially for Mac users. Also, what filesystem are you using for your storage pools?

Very good explain .. clear and precise thank you

Excellent valuable intel. I have older Drobo NAS devices that I use just for backup. Never got good performance. I am just recreational video geek and going in different direction for now. Am getting new 16” MacBook M1 Max with 4 TB. Then offload to external SSD and Drobo and then to IDrive for offsite storage 10 TBs which is not expensive. Will keep your NAS solution in mind.

Sub'ed! keepup the good work.

Well done!

New to editing and trying to do everything right. This is sooo overwhelming and I dont even know how to ask the right questions here. I shall keep researching, but thanks for all the information.

Thank you Alex - I've been looking at getting this particular NAS and I use BRAW files all the time at work. To see both in action (and working!) was very reassuring. Will be interesting to see how it performs in Premiere Pro as Resolve always performs better, but I am hopeful. We also use a mix of PCs and Macs and I understand the Hero FS can be configured for that? Anyway, nice job there.

Great video. I am an amateur and I understood about 60% of this, but this is a great start for me.

I really hope you enjoyed this NAS video! If you did, check out Part 2, which looks at installing a 10 Gigabit home nework for the QNAP NAS, for fully maximise it's speeds: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/a56GpaeasN_anYk.html :)

That's Amazing. My main concern was the editing from the NAS in Da Vinci Resolve, but I believe that's covered with the SSDs. That's phenomenal. I haven't worked with 4K content yet, but I'm planning on upgrading my storage solution. I'm tired of going drive to drive.

Very helpful video, especially filled a few knowledge gaps.

Another great edit!

Nice looking setup, I like that the NVME is accessible from the front. I edit slow motion video for birds in flight and such directly from the NAS as well as photos. I chose Synology DS1819+ and I now have a second NAS a DS1821+. I had a HDD failure on my 1819+ and needed to restore files to a separate storage array to avoid data loss. When the HDD failure occurred, it wrote corrupted files to my NAS recycle bin and when I tried to restore my main folder from the recycle bin my files ended up being 0 Bytes, so it was my fault. The hot swap of the corrupted drive originally worked fine it was my extra step that messed it up. I found some NAS software where was able to recover the majority of my RAW files without file names. It's still restoring 31TB of data now. I reached out to a restore company and they wanted 5K - 25K to restore my files. Synology couldn't assist with it, so having a NAS doesn't fully protect you from data loss & at these sizes a cloud backup solution is not affordable for most unless you want another car or house payment. A second NAS for me was the cheaper option.

Super helpful. Thanks, mate.

Awesome video, thanks!

great video. you showed me exactly what other didn't show what NAS can do.

Super Helpful brother. Thank you!

Amazing video! Super helpful. Does running the System Storage Pool off the SSDs take up 1tb of space? Also would love a more detailed breakdown video of how you set up your pools and settings for video editing. Also would love to see your workflow. I've got the 1288x and am excited to get the most out of it for video work! Thanks for the info!

Really well made video.

If you use the QNAP QDA-U2MP eclosure you can accommodate two M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSDs per each eclosure, basically transforming the NAS from 9 to 11 bays. This will allow having BOTH the QNAP OS and the SSD cache in each own RAID PCIe NVMe SSDs. The SATA SSDs can just be used for just another volume.

Thanks for the excellent overview I picked one up on ebay open box unused for $ 500 and Populated it with refurbished Western Digital 14TB Ultrastar DC HC530 SATA HDD - 7200 RPM Class, SATA OEM drives for $150. because they're actually Hitachi server drives that last forever and for me it's better to have the drives last than the warranty I also I also got 1.2 TB the Mvne SSD drives used for half price and Cheaper SSDs that test out with better performance specs than the red ones just because. I''m upgrading the memory to 16GB. Waiting for my switch next, Other than that I'm Basically mirrioring Alex's setup though I use a PC not a Mac so we'll see how it all goes. Thanks Again.

Fantastic overview on the topic! 💪👏 There are so many moving (and initially costly) parts to consider when you're completely new to the realm of NAS, so it is really assuring to see that you've got a tried and tested solution in place! Many people say Synology is somewhat an easier brand to use, but you seem to be just fine with QNAP too. Have you appended the system with an extension enclosure via the USB-C port as of yet? ... I'm going to have to find a Thunderbolt 2 to 10Gbit adapter somewhere in order to utilize the max speeds! 😅 - Eero

...great video, all around!

I want to see more NAS related videos... Thanks for this

This is very helpful! Thanks!

I've had a 120tb 12bay nas qnap for 3 years and a 80tb synology 12bay for 7. After ask that time I just bought a new Synology to move all the drives from the qnap over. The qnap has been a HUGE pain. Horrible support, massive issues, ip problems slow downs and security issues. The synology has been solid and way more reliable. Not as fast but so much better AND actually has support that will help when you loose your array. Qnap I have 2 backup drives attatched for safety and I'm still scared I'll lose it all some day.

Great video. Hybrid nas.... nice! That seems to be the ticket to editing straight from a NAS.

Well explained - thanks Alex! Would love to see a more detailed view on your file/ structure and Davinci workflow using the NAS storage if that's possible and worth sharing for you (?)

EXCELLENT information! Would you still buy the same Qnap NAS today in january 2023? Or is there a newer version?

Great video, thank you.

It’s not just the SSD caching. When you have a RAID array as opposed to JBOD, you’re also treating the mechanical drives like a parallel connection. So if each mechanical drive would hit 120MB/s, you’re going to get around 450MB/s (it also has to write parity data or overhead which is why it’s not 600MB/s). If you go beyond the amount of SSD cache in a single transfer you’ll be able to see the speed of your mechanical drives.

This is great to see, thanks Alex. I've been running a TS-453BT3 over 10GBe for a few years, but it's not really been up to video editing. Adding an M.2 nvme cache has helped a lot, but as I now need to expand storage further, I'd been looking at the TVS-672XT. However, I hadn't seen the TS-h973AX and think it suits my need better. Nice one 👍 I really like that it has SATA SSD and nvme slots. Are you setting your SSDs in a RAID 1 for the operating system I wonder? On my current set up (RAID 5) the OS is so sluggish on the TS-453BT3, I really want something that's snappy.

Thank you for this amazing video. I was looking this for long time. I am going to build my NAS coming month when I will get my Mac Studio Computer I need the solid NAS for video Editing. Do you have any suggestions today's date? anything new arrive? are you happy with your NAS System?

Awesome video. Exactly what I needed to know. Unfortunately, everything is sold out.

Thank you for sharing!

Hi. I'm not sure that you get much real speed advantage by having the OS and the Apps on the very fast drives. In use the software is loaded into even much faster Random Access Memory and run from there - and you did get the upgraded version. Probably not taking up much room on the NVME so it's not the wrong thing to do. There is some debate about using Raid 5 configuration which you might like to look at online. Also, careful with the cupboard - make sure you have good ventilation into it or the NAS will run hotter than otherwise. The cooler electronics are the longer they last. Thank you very much for publishing this, the planning is very helpful. I've got a significant problem with data volumes using Canon Raw Light - about half a terabyte per hour just from one camera. Liked and subd.

Great video!

The thing I like about your QNAP that I haven’t seen on any Synology device is the three different options for storage types - rotating media, SATA SSD, and NVME SSD, and the ability to specify different purposes for each of those storage pools.

I have a very similar setup. TS-H9743AX with 32 GB and SSD caching. But I am also using the QSW-M408-4C QNAP 10G switch for my 10G network. Also, I'm using RAID 1 on two 10G Red drives, to allow me to expand storage as larger capacity drives become available down the line. I added this setup to my TVS-463 that I was using before. I added the 10G upgrade to the 463. I've had good performance, but not without problems. First, the boot speed on the TS-H9743AX is slow. Also, unlike the 463, there is no HDMI interface. Also, I have worked with both Premiere and Final Cut, and your mounts have to be SMB/CIFS for Final Cut Pro. It sometimes drops this (not sure why honestly), but this is never a problem in Premiere. And yes, I have used Resolve. However, the early "growth" reliability problems on early versions, made me write them off. I understand the that "database corruption" problems have long since been resolved.

Great video as usual, I'm going for a 6 bay NAS just to have a hot spare and be extra sure that I'm covered. The content creation makes us extra paranoid! 🤣

Great video

I actually came across this video because of looking at my own setup. I like to make some compositions of my travels. Mostly video's of hikes or other explorations. So it mostly get big files. After a trip or vacation I always upload everything to my laptop and NAS. My PC to work with the files for editing (should give the fastest/safest responses, and least rendering time). And my NAS for having it backed up (mostly also make another backup on an external HDD to keep it extra safe). But after finishing editing I mostly remove it from my laptop to preserve space (and to work on other video's or projects). And also use my laptop not only for video editing, so other apps also need it's space. I had to re-edit a few video's lately, and I first was thinking about transfering the needed dirs to my laptop again before starting re-editing. But removing files to copy new ones just to re-edit some premade projects is quite a hustle. especially because it are already finished projects and I only need to re-render/export again after a few little modifications. So I actually just started to work straight from my NAS (wired), since the files are already locally stored there. It just seems to work fine, and maybe the render times are a bit longer instead of working directly with the files from my laptop. But I don't seem to see noteworthy problems (also only using 1080p files wit a bitrate of 25K, so it's not a massive dataload neither). But now I was reading the manual of my editing software again, and they strongly recommend not to work from network drives (NAS). But I actually don't seem to notice quality problems, drastic speed drops, errors etc. in the exported/rendered projects/video's. So I went searching Google "why". To find out why they strongly recommend not to use NAS servers etc. Can't find much about it though. And besides transfers speeds or connection drops I could not think about much other possible problems. Especially not since I'm also pre-rendering all the clips because of my system specs. So everything should be rendered locally to my laptop before playback or export. But good to see that editing/ working from network drives/ NAS is more common.

GReat video, really well explained and sod etailed. REally, thank you so much. Now, is there a reason you only use Western Digital drives? Are they providing some sort of sponsorship or you find them to be the most reliable for this system?

Two other notes: It's gonna overheat in a closet; drives toss out a *lot* of British Thermal Units. And I wouldn't use the U.2 for the boot drives; I'd mirror the 2.5 SATAs and use those. You need the speed for data a lot more than for the programs.

Great video and all the information!! thank you! One question, did you need something else to connect the QNA-T310G1T "The Multi-Gig NBase-T" or it goes strait to the computer? Thank you

Please take into consideration that you have no Backup with this setup at all! A RAID-System is not meant to be a backup, it is a failover solution if one harddisk fails. To protect your important data, you still need a second device, ideally physicaly separated from your nas, for example in another building. There are many scenarios where your data is still lost if you have no second backup device. Think about all the malware and trojans like emotet which will encrypt your data and many other scenarios where your data is gone.

That’s awesome. Looks like this setup would run around $4600 in the US as of 2/14/22 based off your affiliate links. Now just have to convince my partner that it’s a good investment

Any idea if using FCP rather than Resolve would affect this configuration for live editing off a NAS? I’m very impressed with your setup and your skill explaining it. Well done and thank you for sharing it.

Awesome. Do you have an updated version of this review workflow?

It's interesting that you nailed my comment, right in the lede: I just noticed, like, *today*, in QNAP's marketing that *they do not quote the size of the parity drive* in their sizing: That unit you have there, with 5 12TB drives? They'd call that a "48TB NAS". I think that's admirable, myself.

Greatly done and many tips help demistify things a bit. Quick questions: Why didn't you opt for the nvme drives for ssd caching? Aren't these the ones that are supposed to be the fastest drives in order to avoid bottlenecks? Active project could possibly be on your macbook pro drive too? And after a considerable amount of time, from your experience is this NAS still a good buy today, or is the low end (by today's standards) processor a limiting factor that could create bottlenecks for 4K editing? Thanks a lot for your kind replies. I 'm considering this NAS too, since the QNAP TVS-h874X is significantly pricier.

Amazing vidro, thank you for sharing 🧡🙏 Can I ask a little unrelated question? You mentioned you film in BRAW, how do you sort focus on a BM when filming yourself?

So freaking helpful

@Alex Pettitt, As mentioned in other comments, get yourself a proper backup for the NAS before you (potentially) lose everything. I had a QNAP NAS and the backplate (for the drive ports) started playing up at about 2 years old. It would “eject” drives from the NAS, initially the third drive would go, then the 4th, 5th and 6th shortly afterwards. It worked intermittently, I swapped drives and ran disk checks on them too. Haven’t used it for a while and looking to build my own. The contents of my NAS are currently on external drives which were direct backups, and also in the cloud.

Hi Alex, amazing video! I work with Komodo footage and your workflow looks amazing! There are also a 932px model that looks like very similar but cheap. Why you didn't choose this model? Thanks!

Thanks. Looks very interesting and confusing. 😀

u r the best!!!!!!!

Great video, Alex! I'm wondering if there's any way to grant access to the media for clients to download? After the video thought it to be neat to have in one single unit your work and also a catalog with folders for each client. Is that possible whit this unit? Any idea on how to achieve this?

Alex, you are amazing! Every one of your videos is clear, concise, wise, and beautifully produced. My skill with the ATEM Mini Pro would be nowhere without your talents. Yesterday, the USB C (webcam/SSD) output port on my unit stopped working. All cables, firmware, PC drivers, and software (including Zoom) is up-to-date, but I get no light when I plug in an SSD and Zoom no longer recognizes the ATEM as a webcam. Any thoughts on a solution? Before I set up NAS, I've got to fix my ATEM. Thank you for any help you can offer, and keep up the great work!

Love this video but man, the $ u spent wow if I only had that much I would 💯 do this. Awesome great video

This video was exactly what I was looking for. It answered all my questions about a NAS setup. I figured, all I had to do was to use the exact same setup and be done with it. However, I then "remembered" that I have a Dell PowerEdge T620 server "sitting around", so why not "convert" that into a NAS!? I then thought about it a little bit and realized, "Wait a minute, my T620 is already setup and running great. Why not just share a drive (make it a network drive) and be done!? Any ideas??? Thanks.

WD has had some issues which may not have been too well know at the time of your posting this video. Still while I was doing research for my synology NAS 3 years ago I found that Seagate HDs were the better choice even back then. You may want to keep that in mind when it comes time to replace drives in your QNAP.

Alex, thank you for sharing your experience with your NAS setup for video editing. So well done!!! I have few questions though. 1. You had to use a QNAP 10gb adapter to connect your MBP. Doesn't your MBP have 10GB built in, not understanding why you needed the adapter. 2. Are you concerned at all about using a QNAP branded NAS vs Synology given the problems with ransomeware problems with QNAP. Perhaps you dont have any external access to your NAS via the internet? Thanks again for this video, so much good information!!!

Freaking show off. 😂 great video as usual. This is a great solution for my office with the project drawings and project documents. Can you come set this up? 😂

Really helpful video. Thanks Alex. I have one question. Can you attach NAS to the USB outlet on Atem Mini Extreme ISO and then access those files over the network? At the moment I'm recording video from Atem Mini to Sandisk Extremes bu then havng to unplug from Atem Mini and into computer USB to edit. A lot of too-ing and fro-ing...

Alex - Great video! Are you using a newer MBP? I can not find a driver to support Xfer speeds faster than 1GB for most of the Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapters. Does the QNAP adapter have a functioning driver for the M1? Any suggestions? Thanks

Great video alex, i just have one doubt, for the ssd's and the nvme's disk that you use for SSD caching, the qnap OS and to edit, can you use more storage than what you bought?? like for the ssd's you have 500gb's and for the nvme's you have 960's gb's, is that because they have a limit in storage or could you use drives with even more storage for those??? cause I just know that the main hard drives are the ones that have an storage limit in all the nas' but I'm not sure about the ssd's and the nvme's

For the storage pools, RAID-5 is okay in smaller capacities, but for larger capacities, you really want RAID-6. And you want a hot spare, if possible.

Thanks! How are you handling offsite backups? Great video

Excellent video and I understood everything to the point. I have a scenario if you can help me. I have a small studio with 5 iMac (old + new) and my Macbook Pro M1. We now use traditional hard disk via usb 3.0. I want to totally go NAS route like you. How do I connect my older iMac to get good speed? 1Gig networking is fine here but we do multiple machine editing. So is there any way to connect all and get good results?

Thank you for this very useful video!! I wanted to know if this setup can be used as a central video storage “server” where a global video team working from different parts of the globe can access the files? I don’t know if you covered already this in another video so asking anyways 😊 Thanks!

Thanks!

Kind of like a MyCloud Home. We have a 6T Raid drive that is accessible remotely and all my families phones and laptops automatically back up to it, as well as Dropbox and social media.

Pretty sweet. Made me think about PCIe system rather than SATA. Any thoughts about that yould like to share?

Great Video. Could you please advise on a scenario where I have one NAS setup and around 6 MacBook Pro editors accessing same files over a 10g network. Example: One large sporting event client provided us around 40TB of footages from their past 20 years of events and using these footages we will have to create several content for current event. In this scenario, 6 editors are editing different video content but using same source files over NAS,. Also, can I also enable my international collaborators (broadcasters mainly) to access my NAS drive to send and receive files from/to NAS at the same time. What are the chances of latency, delay, jittering of footage over timeline?

Hi, first of all, thank you very much for your very interesting vidéo! But I have a question. If you don't use your two "Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe SSD's". What about the speed? It's possible to edit multi cam 5k videos?

Which 6 bay brand do you recemond Somes peoples say raid 6 more safe if 2 drive failure Thanks a lot for sharing with us This backup nas

Great video! I will follow in your footsteps with nearly the exact same config you have. What do you think about the Apple-branded Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter? The one you have from QNAP is no longer available.

Hi Alex! Great video my friend! Any chance you can point to a video that helped you with setting up the NAS like you have?