I have a DS223 Synology NAS that I’m using to backup my photography (both still and video). I’m finding when I work with video in Final Cut that things are painfully slow (I am using the Ethernet connection). I’m considering upgrading to the DS1522+. If I get the 10GbE connectivity add-on will that help with my live video editing? I’m assuming it will. Thx
NAS Compares just did a video on this a few days ago. Basically you have to increase the pipe (10 GbE) while making sure the speed of the drives (NVMe, RAID, etc.) can saturate it.
TLDR: a switch to a SATA SSD pool with RAID5 to go along with the hardware upgrade incl. 10GbE should be OK.
If you keep the DS223, you could use it as your storage NAS, and the DS1522+ for more demanding tasks.
A good RAID performance calculator is this one: RAID Performance Calculator - WintelGuy.com
If you plan on switching to a SATA SSD storage pool, you need to click on the link slightly further down on that page, where it says: “For SSD RAID use the special version of the calculator”.
If you have four Seagate IronWolf Pro HDDs (214 MB/s read/write) in a RAID5, you get a speed of 0.34 GB/s for your pool with a 50% split between reads & writes. (That would already be more than twice as fast as your current setup with a 1GbE network.) Writes only (0% reads) would theoretically max out at the speed of a single HDD, i.e. 0.21 GB/s. Maximum theoretical read speed (100% reads) would be 0.86 GB/s.
I’m not a video editor, but I assume that there are more writes necessary than with a standard write-once-read-often storage pool, so a pool of 4 HDDs would not be able to saturate a 10GbE network connection, which has a theoretical bandwidth of 1.25 GB/s.
You could increase (basically double) write speeds with a RAID10, but you’d lose one HDD worth of storage compared to a RAID5, and you would not gain anything on the read side of things.
With SATA SSDs (e.g. 4 x 4TB) and a RAID5, you wouldn’t be able to saturate 10GbE with write operations either (0.54 GB/s), but with a RAID10 you would come close (1.06 GB/s). For read operations, your pool’s maximum theoretical speed would be more than 10GbE can handle, whether with RAID5 or RAID10. With a 50:50 split, you’d still get a decent 0.88 GB/s overall performance in a RAID5 setup. So generally, with SATA SSDs, a RAID10 would also be the better option, the one that will saturate your network connection in most scenarios. (But RAID5 could be sufficiently fast, too.)
From what I read online, adding one or two M.2 SSDs as read/write caches will not really help, because it’s mostly good for lots of small files and IOPS. However, if several people edit video or photos on the NAS at the same time, then a cache might improve performance somewhat.
What I would do, however, is max out the RAM. You can never have enough RAM, and similar to ZFS, btrfs also does some caching in RAM.
In the end, what solution (HDD or SSD, RAID5 or RAID10) and therefore which speeds you need also depends on the resolution and bitrate of your videos and photos, how many video streams are open in Final Cut, and also if you want a system that is future-proof for bigger files. Possibly, a solution with HDDs and a RAID5 might be fast enough for your current needs, even if it doesn’t saturate the 10GbE connection. But HDDs might not cut it for e.g. 4K ProRes ultra-high definition material.
Just filled a video on this.
Basically you would need at least probably 4x drives in RAID5 and the 10gig connection to be rock solid stable. That would net you ~500 MB/s which should be more than enough for any kind of Multicam setup.
The DS1522+ is solid for this. Though the 1621+ may be worth the upgrade cost for more performance and future expansion