Upgrading from a TS-453a to a 932x or 963x and 10gbe networking

We are a small 3d studio consisting of 3-4 people working in an office with several computers/workstations and a single NAS we bought 2 years ago the QNAP TS-453a. We were actually so clueless that we bought a NAS at the time that had a lot of the features we never used or needed like HDMI ports, VM machines, transcoding, etc…
We are mainly using the NAS as a fileserver for opening files and editing them/saving-writing them on the NAS. We also use the 453a as a server for textures and 3d assets so that when we do distribute/network rendering all assets are being opened/read from the NAS directly through the raw-rendering power is happening inside the local machines/workstations. Currently, we use 4x3TB WD Red NAS drives in a RAID1 array and the read/write speeds are around the usual 100-110mb/s mark. Though when a few of us open, save files this number drops rapidly. We haven’t tried link aggregation since our switch doesn’t support it even though the NAS does.
Since we are rapidly filling our storage we are interested to upgrade and since the prices for a 10gbe setup have been falling drastically we would like to take that route but need a advice.

You will be using NAS as a fast storage solution, so faster processor would be useful only for RAID rebuild situations. The TS-932x come with two 10GbE SFP ports which can be set up as link aggregation or load balancing. With link aggregation, you would need to upgrade other computers with dual LAN cards, but load balancing will be very useful as ass traffic will be equally directed over two cables.

Thanks to a Qnap SFP /RJ45 connection switch, you can easily connect devices with different network connections. You can connect either with baseT os SFP copper or optic and switch will convert all connections automatically in the compatible format.

All Qnap speed tests are mainly based on SSD and link aggregated connections. But you can expect in average 100-200 MB/s per HDD combines in a RAID or 300-500 with an SSD. Therefore Tiered storage is very useful because all data will be automatically located on the appropriate speed media.

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