NAS and Daz
Deadly Buda
Posts: 155
How well does Daz Studio work with a decent NAS like Synology 5 bay?
I'd like to have a general workstation accessing the NAS, as well as my laptop remotely, and then a computer just for rendering.
Is the NAS in RAID5 going to be slower than say, a 4TB SSD, or faster? I'm thinking of using 5x 6TB 7200rpm drives in the NAS.
Is this a pipedream for Daz, or would this actually do what I want it to do, i.e. speedy access times across 3 or more computers?
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Comments
It will be slower. A lot slower. I have a Synology NAS (a DS218), and because it transfers all data over the internet, via the Synology servers, there is a a lag in response. As a backup device, I'm not concerned by the delay, but it would be a real problem if I used it to feed data directly to Studio.
In theory, you may be able to use the Synology NAS's USB ports, but I could never get it to work reliably.
Hmmm.... yeah I just changed my OS/content drive from a 2tB nVMe to putting just content on a 4TB StoreMi solution and it seems a lot slower. So a NAS would be even slower? Ugh. So really the best way is to use multiple 4TB SSDs for content and just copy from one drive to another?
Would just having the NAS as a home network be faster?
I was going to go the home network route when I bought my last laptop - but I found my DS216 slow, and reverted back to having my content on the second internal hard disk in the laptop (which I since have to upgrade to 2TB). I just use my NAS for backup and sharing other files between computers, and a USB external hard disk for my content backup.
Internal drives are, to the best of my knowledge, faster (to read/write) than an external version of the same drives. The best compromise of speed and value that I've found for Windows machines is a fast C drive and large storage drives, but if you have the money a large SSD main drive is better for speed.
And always have a decent backup system, because it is almost impossible to avoid a system crash through faulty equipment or other failure when you least expect it.
I have a NAS on my home network. Synology is tanking your performance not the NAS. I routinel saturate my 1 Gb ethernet transfering files around on the network and that is only a little slower than reading data locally.
Synology is setup for people who don't know pretty much anything technical. A NAS is simply a PC that has a lot of drives and runs an OS that is intended for such. Unraid and FreeNAS are both quite good and have setups that automate pretty much the whole process. I like UnRAID, but it does cost, because it let me setup what is effectively a RAID 50 without a hardware controller, which are very expensive.
Hey everyone thanks for the insight. Though I have to say now I'm more confused! :-D Maybe I have to refine my goals:
I want one drive for Daz content that multiple computers share. Also, I'd be using this thing for Premiere Pro editing as well. What's the fastest way to do that?
Here is what I grok so far:
option 1: Use a big SSD in my workstation and share it on the home network so that my laptop can access it. Remotely through something like a DNS service.
option 2: UnRaid or FreeNAS on an old computer I have laying around and stock it with 6x 6TB Ironwolf Pros to do RAID 50 if I have to.
So would the RAID setup (RAID 5 or 50 I guess) be faster than the SSD?
1) HDD's are unlikely to ever match an SSD. However mass solid state storage gets very expensive when you're talking 3D assets and video files. 6TB SSD's presently cost at least $1200 US. However you have to consider the speed of your ethernet. 1Gb ethernet is not terribly hard to saturate with either HDD's or SSD's (SATA has a rated transfer speed of 6 Gb/s a second).
2) UnRaid will let you designate the drive setup, which will allow you to mimic any RAID you want but it isn't actually precisely that RAID but their own implementation. I've been using it for several years and haven't had an issue but YMMV. Also there is no need to go with Ironwolf Pro's over regular Ironwolf's unless you just have the spare budget (at 6TB the Pro's are $50 more each) or want the extra 2 years of warranty coverage.
A quick explanation of RAID just to be sure you understand it.
RAID 0 has no redundancy and any failure destroys all you data. However throughput is increased by the number of drives involved.
RAID 5 shares parity information across all the drives, therefore if one disk fails all the data can be rebuilt. Rebuild operations involving lots of data can take a very long time and if there are other drives in poor health they can fail duringthe rebuildand cost you the whole array.
RAID 50 combines the features of RAID 5 and RAID 0. You get increased total storage of the volume and better resistance to failures but it requires at least 6 physical drives to implement and it is actually pretty hard to find a RASID controller that supports it.
I use UnRaid to effectively create a RAID 50 in my NAS but it is software and not hardware so there are some performance costs, particularly in writes.