Best Synology NAS for 4K YouTube video editing

I have been watching many of your videos on NASCompares channel and SPAN channel and they are really helpful, thanks! I have learned so much from your content already. I’m now trying to choose which Synology NAS to purchase for heavy duty 4K video editing.

I run a small business (YouTube channel Bounce Patrol Kids). We have 2 full time video editors who will edit live off the NAS. Both editors are on Windows machines with thunderbolt connectivity, running Premiere Pro. A typical video project has 6-10 layers of 4K footage on the timeline, so Premiere is trying to read and render many 4K video files simultaneously. We use Team Projects feature in Premiere, so both editors can work on the same video project concurrently.

We have 3 other computers in the office that will be attached to the NAS (probably over Wifi) but they don’t need video editing read/write speeds. One computer is running ProTools in our recording studio.

The 2 video editor desks are in close physical distance to each other, so they could both be physically plugged into the NAS if necessary (rather than via a network switch). But 10GbE is probably better for us than thunderbolt, cos over time we could connect more video editor or other workstations via a switch. So we’re planning to purchase 2 thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapters, and a 2-port 10GbE PCIe card for the NAS.

Each video project is about 1TB of ProRes footage. We need about 60-80TB usable storage, plus redundancy. We need super safe redundancy; multiple drives to fail without losing any data. Plus we need some full backup solution, a complete copy of the data. File sizes too large to backup over the internet, probably needs to be local. Thinking maybe with the choice of RAID setup or with another attached NAS as backup?

What NAS and drives should we buy? How many SSDs should we include and set aside for caching? Based on your videos and articles I guess the DS3617xs or maybe the DS1817+ ??

I would prefer Synology over QNAP because the expansion capability and the software is appealing, particular the Moments photos app. But open to all suggestions.

If you had a server room, I would suggest QNAP-TVS-1582TU-I7 wich feature HDD as well as SSD bays. Synology alternative would be RS3617xs which is also 10G ready.

A desktop option would indeed be DS3617XS with free NAS replacement service included. You can also install dual 10GbE card (or even quad 10G – Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X710-T4 or even 25G/40g cards). For the best performance you could fill it with 6 SSD and 6 HDDs SSD for editing and HDD for raw footage/finished material.

If you get two of these, you can enable so called “high availability” mode. This means, both NAS system will be perfectly synchronised. If one dies, other will replace it within seconds. All users can carry work possibly without even noticing that main NAS unit is gone.

The recommended drives for editing direclty of this media will be WD Pro or Ironwolf Pro. But if you fill them 6 SSD and 6 HDD, then regular WD red or regular Ironwolfs.

 

Alternative to this would be new Qnap TVS-872XT which feature couple of NVMe SSD slots (potentially over 2000MB/s data transfer speed when used as volume). Then editing can be done one NVMe and storage/ backup and distribution on regular HDD.

 

 

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Find regulary updated NAS offers here
Of course I would prefer you choose AMAZON UK AMAZON USA to buy your perfect solution, however, if you would rather buy locally, please use the links used above to take you to your local Amazon store and help support this free advice service with ad revenue. More ways of supporting the blog are described HERE  
Home: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html#af9rgr Business: https://www.backblaze.com/business-backup.html#af9rgr Comparison with other service providers: https://www.backblaze.com/best-online-backup-service.html#af9rgr