Best Video editing storage setup

We are a small agency wanting to move from a bunch of external drives being passed around the office to an actual shared file server to enable collaborative video workflows. We have 2-3 artists that would be occasionally be cutting 4K footage on the same project at the same time, as well as a few graphic designers and other staff we would like to have save their assets centrally but would be perfectly fine with a 1Gb pipe. We are a Mac facility using mostly Premiere and After Effects.

Price is a concern in convincing management to move to a NAS so I was looking at inexpensive Synology options. I know they are also apprehensive about admin overhead and the DiskStation line is known for ease of use. The DS1817 has 10GbE included but has minimal RAM and a slow processor. For a little bit more, the DS1817+ has more RAM and faster processor but would need a 10GbE card added in the expansion slot because that is more important for editing than caching. The actual media cache and scratch disks for Premiere will reside on our local SSDs. We would not be using it as a streaming media server for transcoding proxies, only as a file server. More read than write.

I also looked at the QNAP TVS-1282T3 as the next option but that easily puts us up to the next price bracket. The Hybrid Raid mode is appealing so we can have mismatches drive sizes if necessary and easily upgrade disks and expand once this solution is proven. Is the DS1817 even worth trying to do 4K editing off of or do we need to just bite the bullet and go with the TBS-1282T3? How much of a bottleneck is the processor in software RAID? Does onboard SSD cache really matter a lot? Help!

If you want this to be a long-term investment- you will need to bite the bullet and get TVS-1282T3 (or TVS-1282 non Thunderbolt variant). Synology is a very limited solution for video editors. They have many amazing features but they lack on hardware side massively.

Qnap will not restrict you between choosing one thing or another (like 10GbE or Nvme cache)- you can have it all. TVS-1282 is an ultimate solution, but just now Qnap have released their 72xt series which is way more affordable. You will find 10GbE port on them and NVMe M.2 slots on the board (dual NVMe test crossed 1300MB/s speed- which is amazing). This means that you can edit on a couple of NVme drives and use HDD media for storing the footage or finished projects. Keeping these things separate will improve the security as well as NAS performance.

This is how much it will cost:

NAS Server	TVS-872XT	B&H $1899
Hard Drives	Seagate Iron Wolf 6TB	$170.00
Switch	NETGEAR ProSAFE XS708Ev2 8-Port 10-Gigabit Switch	$640.00
10G Adapter	Sonnet Solo 10G Thunderbolt 3	$200.00
Cabling	Cat 7	$150.00
UPS	APC (BX1500M) 1500VA Battery Backup	$170.00

Total $3229

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