Hello good people. I have been a long time viewer of the Youtube channel but my first time on the forum seeking your expertise.
So I am in the process of deciding what to do with my video editing/storage server build. The difference with your typical NAS build would be that it only needs to be up and running when I am editing on my PC and rendering.
Current hardware of the server is a i73820 16G DDR3 TP Link 10Gbps NIC. Along with this I have 2x6TB Drives and 2x4TB drives. With the intention of adding more in the future (even if I have to destroy the pool and start again). I know that the combination of disks I have is not ideal but it is what I am hoping to start with and get my feet wet with setting up the OS and drive pools and vdevs etc.
What would be the best way to approach the vdev and data pool setups in this case? Keeping in mind it would only be up for 10~12hours per day. I am looking for a balance in performance, storage space and integrity (priority in that order).
How many users (assume just 1), how many streams in a typical project, and what is the typical bitrate of the video streams?
Decently fast drives in a RAIDZ (raid 5) should be fast enough for most things when working with a compressed codec. You could grow the size by swapping bigger drives over time, with the drives you have you’d get around 12TB.
That said there are advantages that were discussed in another thread about doing mirrors because you could add additional drive pairs to grow the storage over time. You’d need to look for that thread to get a better understanding.
My system is similar in processing power, and I have 8 drives in a RAIDz. I’ve tested this to 10 users, with 4 streams (each user) of XDCam EX at 35mbps per stream with no issues. XDCam EX is what our cameras record. We often have 5 users with 2 streams going in real life work.
Now if you are running something like 100mbps or higher, you will certainly be limited in the number of streams, but 2 or 4 should be possible until you get much higher
Hi Greg thank you very much for your input. It’s just me (video editor) and a couple of graphic desginers so what you are suggesting sounds really good to me even though I work with higher bitrate codec normally. I got my server up and running now but I’ve run into an issue with the 10Gb card (TP Link TX401) not being recognized by Truenas. Is there any way to get around the native compatibility?
Lots of inexpensive 10gb Intel cards on the used market.
What codecs and bit rates are you using? This is probably the most important thing in determining what is fast enough. If you are running 400mbps video streams, then you’ll need fast drives and more drives is better.