How does Cubase Projects and audio/video files inside projects behave if they all (including .cpr and all audio files) is located inside a NAS?
I’m currently using Google Drive File Stream but consider switching because of professional companies don’t like having their precious files on another Company Cloud and well more space is nice.
IME, a NAS only works well if it has special provisions for real-time media data:
If you have only 1-2 persons using the NAS, you don’t need such a $$ system, esp. not for audio-only CB projects.
On the other end, if you work on movie projects and/or have a bunch of teenagers streaming from the NAS as you work… you might find any NAS a bit too slow. (but usable)
For a positive and stable experience, I recommend using a wired 10Gbps network from your PC to the NAS.
Using a UPS on both the NAS and your ethernet switches is also good practice.
Final note: if you have an other PC (stable/reliable) you can use it as a NAS, just by sharing its drives. You can try it with its stock 1Gbps port, but consider buying a 10Gbps NIC eventually if your patience is as short as mine…
I’ve tried to use consumer NAS(eg QNAP devices) devices for at least 10 years, but they were/are just not reliable enough(vulnerable to attacks, buggy OS).
OK for media consumption, but not for media production.
Plus, RAID systems with non-native filesystems(EXT) plus network stacks make a system more prone to errors that are not easy to fix.
I even stopped using NAS as a backup destination. Using DAS plus Backblaze now for that. Much less hassle/maintenance.
That happens only if you open your firewall to access the NAS from the outside and this is something you simply neeed to avoid. In the last 15 years I had no problem whatsoever on the NAS (a Synology system).
What is a “non-native filesystem”?
A network stack is used in every device that is connected , so what is the problem here?
If you do not want to spend the money for a system like SNS you can definitely work with other NAS types. What you need is a 10Gbps network connection and ideally SSDs as drives.
I’ve configured them as RAID6 using BTRFS and it works like a charm.
OP wants to share stuff with other people(Google Drive)? This means some form of access from the wild and dangerous interwebs.
Non-native: EXT is not a Mac/PC native filesystem. If something goes wrong, you need another NAS/Linux system to see what you can salvage. There are subtle changes in allowed filenames (for example) that may bite you at some point.
Networkstack: slow and CPU heavy compared to direct attached storage.
You will need a pro server, 10 GbE, RAID5 or even 10, and a powerful system for non-trivial projects.
My newest QNAP with 10 GbE does 5-600 MB/s read max, then the CPU runs out of steam.
Even a simple and now cheap SATA SSD can keep up with this, let alone NVME.
Sample libraries on a NAS: slow.
So it might work for some, but for me it isn’t worth the trouble.
After using one for 3 or so years, I think QNAP and Synology are quite a bit different when it comes to reliability. I have a QNAP TS-251D with a pair of 4TB drives in it (one data, the other the backup) that has all our DVDs ripped to a Plex server. Plex itself works great, but even routine maintenance is iffy on it. Almost every time there is a firmware update for it, the drive does not recover properly. Sometimes I have to sit and reboot the thing for hours before it ‘wakes up’ and starts working again, a few times I’ve had to actually get out a Windows machine and run the QNAP recovery on it to ‘fix it’. The last time I did that was December, and even then, the recovery doesnt work hah. I watched it supposedly write this entire factory Linux image to it so I could start all over, and as soon as it rebooted, there it was back where I left it when it stopped booting.
I 'll be buying a Synology when the day comes I have to replace it. QNAP is just not very user friendly when it comes to troubleshooting or recovery, and it seems to need it an awful lot compared to the rest. If I was a normal old user and didn’t happen to be a ‘computer geek’ for a living, I would have thrown that thing out years ago.
There is no NAS that I know of, that uses a Windows or Mac filesystem and really, you don’t want these filesystems on a NAS box, no way, never…
Using a RAID system means you are running redundant storage, exactly to avoid trouble in case a disk fails. A RAID5 system allows one complete disk to fail, RAID6 (“six”, which is what I use) allows two disks to fail.
Just replace the failed disks, while the NAS is online and they get synched automatically.
I case of a filesystem failure you have the same trouble you get if your internal or USB disk crashes. But that is why a filesystem like BTRFS is used, it can recover filesystem errors.
What is a “pro server” in this context? All the NAS is doing is reading and writing data, you do not run the DAW on it. The Synology here has a AMD Ryzen CPU in it and is capable of up to 32GB RAM.
And yes, I mentioned it, you need a 10Gbps network connection, which is not a pro feature anymore, you find that even in consumer devices these days.
RAID5 is what I already mentioned, you don’t want RAID10. That is expensive, because it requires at least four identical disks and you get the space of one of the disks. The other disks are just for striping and mirroring.
I doubt the CPU is “out of steam”, it is much more likely your network can’t cope with the speed. It is not just the NAS, all network components need to be capable of getting the full power.
I have several libraries on a network drive and it works perfectly fine. I have no problem or extra wait time just by loading a library. However, I also usually try to keep them on internal disks.
Ok, so you do not have any kind of redundancy. The device can hold two disks and you are using them separately, right?
That makes it as dangerous as a single disk in your PC itself. I have not much experience with these small QNAP devices, I have one customer who uses one of these rack devices that holds 12 disks and runs in RAID6. It runs now for the last six years and had no failure at all, even after firmware and system updates.
No idea how QNAP handles smaller devices, but your experience doesn’t sound nice.
Make sure you get at least four slots and setup the system as one of the RAID configs, then it should be without such a trouble as you describe.
You must have completely missed the description you quoted where one drive has all the data, the other is the backup?? Not to mention it also goes to a Backblaze account every night too. Im not really sure how RAID redundancy would help, the drive setup has absolutely nothing to do with the firmware flashes not working correctly. I’ve never once lost any data on it, and if I did, I have two backups in place already.