RAID0 is an option, but I don’t want to risk that. I’m not using any NVMe drives in my NAS as the type of work I do doesn’t really benefit from a cache, and unfortunately, the NVMe drives are limited to only 2 lanes of PCIe, which would be slower than my SSD array. This allows me to offload media to other drives and transcode at the same time without slowing either process down, a sort of facsimile of storage tiering. The SSDs are used for transcoding and moving footage to other drives. The speeds aren’t spectacular (compared to my internal NVMe system drives), since these are SATA SSDs, but we’ll touch on this more later. Like with the hard drives, I can lose a single drive and still keep working, and being SSDs, there are minimum speed penalties. While RAID5 is generally discouraged for SSDs, these aren’t running 24/7, and Seagate rates these drives at 1.4 Petabytes of write endurance not accounting for over-provisioning, which for reference would mean I’d need to write 1TB per day, every single day, for over two and a half years. I’m also running four 1TB Seagate IronWolf 125 SSDs in RAID5 with 23% Over Provisioning, for a total usable capacity of 2TB. This might seem like overkill, and frankly it kind of is, but I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard from a production a month after the shoot asking me if I’d happen to have a backup of the footage answering that with a yes is always nice. The capacity also allows me ample room to store footage from jobs for months, as well as record live footage for playback for myself and the cinematographer. RAID5 also greatly increases my read speed, without sacrificing too much write speed and these huge 16TB drives are pretty quick for spinning rust, to begin with. This provides me with a single drive failure tolerance which for my use case is fine, as the data is always backed up in at least two other locations. I’m running four 16TB Seagate IronWolf Pro hard drives from Seagate in RAID5 for a total of about 43TB usable. QNAP TVS-872XT Thunderbolt NAS Setup and Performance Let’s get into how I have my QNAP configured and how this configuration helps me avoid the aforementioned bottlenecks. I also like to have a copy of the shoot on something I bring home as an additional backup. Unfortunately for me, production doesn’t usually have the budget to buy me a high-end all-flash RAID array for each job, so offloading that work is critical. While production will provide me with something like a 2-bay external RAID for delivery to post-production (G-Tech G-RAIDs are a popular option), those drives quickly choke when offloading multiple cameras and transcoding the previous batch of media at the same time. The biggest bottleneck in most of this is drive speed. Raw throughput is the name of the game, with multi-camera shoots capable of producing terabytes of data per day, with hours of footage needing to be transcoded. All of this, as you can imagine, is very data-intensive and this is where a device like the QNAP TVS-872XT comes in. In addition to image and color responsibilities, I’m also in charge of managing all of the data on set, including downloading footage from the camera, transcoding the digital camera negatives into a format for post-production, and creating “dailies,” which are smaller versions of the footage for the Director and Cinematographer to review at the end of the day. It’s a lot more involved than that, but I’m oversimplifying for the sake of brevity. A DIT, briefly, is in charge of the color pipeline on film, television, and commercial sets, working with the Director of Photography to manage the image coming out of the camera to achieve the look and feel they desire. Intel Core i5-8400T, 6-core 1.7GHz – 3.3GHzġx 10GBASE-T RJ45 port(10GbE, 5GbE, 2.5GbE, 1GbE)Ģx Thunderbolt 3 ports via included expansion cardīy day, I’m a Digital Imaging Technician (DIT) and a member of IATSE Local 600, and I primarily work in New York City. QNAP TVS-872XT Thunderbolt NAS/DAS Specifications CPU Let’s quickly look at the specifications of this NAS and then get into a bit about me and how I’ve been using this. On paper, this is a really feature-rich NAS, and given its price, it ought to be. I’m running four 16TB IronWolf Pro hard drives from Seagate in RAID5, as well as four Seagate IronWolf 125 SSDs in RAID5 with 23% Over Provisioning. Today, we’re going to be looking at how I use this device in my workflow both on and off film and commercial sets. It’s part of QNAP’s x72XT lineup of NASs that offer both dual Thunderbolt 3 ports as well as 10GbE on board for cross-platform collaboration between macOS and Windows users. The QNAP TVS-872XT is an 8-bay, Thunderbolt NAS designed primarily for video and media applications.
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