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Editing Storage Guide I Best Setup for Professionals in 2023
Everything that you edit has to live somewhere. It’s simple, right? Get a USB drive, plug it in and go! This is where most editors start, but as the quantity of work and budgets increase, storing your work on a collection of removable hard drives isn’t going to cut it.
We’re not just talking about the safety of your precious footage, we’re also talking about the ease with which you can access and share it, and the speed at which you can work. This is going to be a crash course in storage technology for video editors, and we’ll also show you what we are using for our storage.
All Drives Break Eventually
First, data safety. Hard drives fail, SSDs fail. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. That’s why if you want your data to be safe, you need to have at least two copies.
Or even better, you might have heard of the 321 policy. For your data to be safe, you should have three copies in at least two places at any one time. That way, if your office burns down, your data is recoverable.
You might question ‘What’s the big deal? What if I lose some data?’
Imagine if a client has sunk $1000, or maybe $50,000 into a day of production. If you lose those files, the client will lose their money and you might lose a client.
Or maybe you’re storing years of your own footage and videos – how would you feel if you lost everything? Your data is worth serious money, and sometimes it’s priceless.
Drive Speed Matters
Next, drive speed. Not all storage is equal – some are fast, some are slow. Footage is getting more and more demanding for computers to play. The key metric here is bitrate – How many bits does the computer have to read per second to play your footage back smoothly?
The drive must be faster than the footage’s bitrate. Also, if you’re playing several clips at the same time, for example, when editing multicam footage, the drive needs to be even faster.
Next, cost. There’s two main technologies we use for storage: hard drives, mechanical disks with spinning platters, and solid state drives with no moving parts, where the data is stored in memory chips. The faster a mechanical disk spins, (generally) the faster a hard drive can read and write.
Hard Drive vs Solid State
Hard drives are designed to spin either at 5,400 rpm, 7,200 rpm, or 10,000 rpm. On the other hand, because solid state drives have no moving parts, they are much faster than their mechanical counterparts. Sadly, they cost a lot more too. There’s two main types of SSD: SATA and NVME. SATA is slower but cheaper, NVME is faster but more expensive.
Either way, increased performance comes at a cost. At some point you’ll have to choose between high performance, low capacity, or low cost, high capacity redundancy.
What About RAID?
You might have heard of RAID. It’s an acronym that stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It’s a clever technology that helps you build larger drives, and depending on the type of rate used can provide protection against drive failure.
RAID allows you to group several hard drives together into an array, and their capacities are combined into one giant drive with certain types of RAID. Some drives in the array are kept as spares, and a (sort of) copy of your data is kept on those hard drives.
This can also give you an increase in performance, but more importantly, your array can sustain the loss of one or two hard drives without losing data, because it can instantly recover the data from this spare hard drives in the array.
This is incredibly important when dealing with large amounts of data and large numbers of hard drives because remember: if you have 10 hard drives, you’re 10 times more likely to experience a drive failure than if you have just one.
Backups
The software that you use to manage your storage is important. Even if drive failure is never a cause of data loss, then at some point human error will get you. You could drop a drive, lose a drive, or accidentally delete data. Or even worse, your office could burn down or be flooded.
Remember we mentioned the 321 data policy? Well, you’re going want a complete backup of your data, preferably in a different location. And if your backup system is reliant on you remembering to manually make a backup, well, what are the chances of you forgetting?
Good software will help mitigate the chance of you accidentally damaging your data. Now that we understand those key concepts, we are ready to specify our own system.
Options for Editors
Let’s talk about the different options available:
Most editors start out with USB hard drives. They’re cheap, but they offer poor performance. There’s no automated backup and they can only be accessed by one person at a time, and they’re also time intensive to manage. The cost of these is cheap though, at around $16/Tb.
What about using USB SSDs? Of course, these are faster, so you’re gonna be able to work with higher bit rate footage, but you’ll have all the other same problems that we have working with piles of USB hard disks. The cost of these is significantly higher at around $125/Tb
Premium storage devices like Promise Pegasus offer some advantages. They’ve got increased capacity and speed thanks to technologies like raid, and they have limited protection against drive failure, but they can also get expensive, at around $95/Tb, and still they can kind of only be accessed by one person at a time.
NAS Options
Instead of connecting to your computer via USB or Thunderbolt, a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device connects to your network. Multiple users can now simultaneously access data over the network. It’s basically a mini server. The NAS can even be set up for remote access over the internet and can automate tasks like backups.
It’s possible to build your own NAS using regular computer components. You might even be able to convert an old computer by sourcing components and assembling them yourselves, and then using an operating system like TrueNAS, so it’s possible to save money.
However, it’s going to take you more time to setup. And you’ve got to consider how much is a day of your time is worth. You’ll also be responsible for solving any issues that you encounter along the way. The price of this is around $50/Tb.
Alternatively, what about an enterprise grade NAS? A device like this is aimed at IT professionals and networks with hundreds of users, so the cost and learning curve on a piece of hardware like this might be a little bit prohibitive for users like you and me. After all, I’m a video editor, not an IT professional. This is around $200/Tb
Additionally, there are some manufacturers that make a NAS specifically for video editors like LumaForge with their Jellyfish range. This obviously seems like a promising option, so let’s see how much it costs.
$27,000? That’s not cool! Ultimately, I think that we can do a lot better here. There’s a sweet spot somewhere in the middle between those time intensive solutions like building your own hardware, and those massively money intensive pre-built solutions. And that brings us to option seven: introducing Synology and QNAP.
Our Storage Choice
Now, both of these companies have an extensive range of NAS devices. Everything from like single drive units all the way up to rack mount servers. You can pick a capacity and a feature set that’s gonna work for you, and then you just basically install your own set of hard drives. The cost of this is actually only about $60/Tb. Not bad.
In this case, I’m choosing Synology – firstly, because I’ve been using Synology for the past 10 years, and like their hardware and software. Secondly, there is a particular model that I’m interested in. It’s their 12 bay desktop NAS. Their range is easy to understand.
The plus series is a good mix of features and price, but you should choose the model that will give you the capacity and performance you need. Think about how much storage you currently need and how much you are likely to need within the products lifespan. I chose the DS2422+.
This is just basically a computer with a ton of hard drive base. I don’t want the speed of our network to become a bottleneck here, so Wi-Fi is out. What I’m going to need is a wired network.
Networking
Depending on your cabling and hardware, different networks run at different speeds. The most common network speed in homes and offices is 1Gbps. That’s too slow for me.
I need at least 2.5 or even 10Gbps networking. Faster is better, right? But also typically more expensive. A 10Gbps network requires more expensive cabling, more expensive switches, and more expensive interface cards.
Interestingly, mechanical discs aren’t fast enough to saturate a 10Gbps connection and 2.5Gbps is more than enough for most video files, so 2.5 might not be as big an issue as you think.
The DS2422+ only has one gigabit network ports. To get 10 gigabits, you’re going to need to install a 10Gbps Network Interface Card (NIC) in the Disk Station’s PCI expansion slot. You can use a third party NIC, but just make sure that you check the compatibility.
I’ll be using Synology’s own E10M20-T1, because this also has two NVME slots, and I’m going to be using those for installing NVME M.2 SSD drives as a cache.
Hard Drive Choice
So what about the actual storage drives? I’m planning on filling the disk station with the biggest drives we can, and I also want performance, so I’m going to be using 7,200 RPM drives.
Most hard disk manufacturers make drives that are marketed specifically for NAS enclosures, but they tend to have a higher price though. Are these drives any different from their desktop versions?
In short, Yeah, there are a couple key differences. Having 12 drives squished together in one enclosure means more heat and it means more vibration. NAS drives are designed to tolerate these conditions better.
They also have different firmware that’s optimized for use in a RAID array. And finally, a lot of NAS drives come with extended warranties and free data recovery plans.
If you are on a tight budget, you might be interested in something called hard drive shucking – that’s when you buy a USB desktop hard drive, open it up and pull the hard drive out. They’re just normal SATA drives inside. I’ve done this in the past and I’ve had no problems, but it’s only worthwhile if these hard drives are significantly cheaper than their enterprise counterparts.
NVME Cache
Finally, let’s talk about those NVME slots on the expansion card that we installed. I’m going to install a 400GB NVME drive in each slot. These are gonna be used to boost the speed of the NAS by acting as read and write cache. When a file is written to the DiskStation, it’s first written temporarily to the NVME, the system then writes the data onto the slower mechanical disks.
Next, small files that are accessed regularly are gonna be stored in the read cash for faster access. Also, performing a search on your drives will be much quicker now because the cache is gonna hold a readily available index of every single file name on the NAS. Now, it should be noted, SSD read and write caches are more beneficial for workflows that regularly access small files.
As video production revolves mostly around using large video files, the SSD cache won’t have as significant an impact on performance for us because the cache is just not going to be big enough to contain the footage.
If I dump a 1Tb card of rushes onto the server, as soon as the cache is filled, the transfer speed will just be limited by the speed of the mechanical disks. So there are performance gains, but don’t expect huge leaps.
Power Supply
There’s one final thing that we need. It’s not absolutely necessary, but I definitely recommended an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS). In the event of a power loss, a UPS is gonna keep the NAS running while it performs a proper shutdown.
Whatever NAS you choose, look at its power consumption and buy an appropriately sized UPS. Remember, you don’t need it to run for hours, you just need it to run long enough to be able to shut down safely.
Initial Setup
Setup is easy, plug in and turn on, and then just configure via a web interface. There’ll be on-screen instructions that’ll help you along the way. We’re using Synology hybrid RAID with two drive fault tolerance. That means I can lose a total of two drives without losing any data at all. That’s pretty good.
You’ll need to set up users and configure their permissions. These the credentials you’ll need to enter when you connect to the NAS. You’ll also need to create shares and assign who can access them. There are tools for configuring backups, setting up VPNs and analyzing performance. There’s even an app store for adding additional functionality to your DiskStation.
We did have to do a little bit of Googling and going through the Synology help features to set up the users and the storage pools, but that information was pretty easy to find, so there was really no trouble so far.
It’s been fast, and easy to access for my workstation or laptop. I like being able to organize all of my projects and my files onto one massive virtual drive instead of having to remember which hard drive each project is on.
Testing
It’s time to test the performance as a benchmark.
Let’s compare the speed of a USB mechanical hard drive, a USB-C solid state drive, and our NAS setup over a 10Gbps network. You can see our measured transfer speeds below.
Of course, here we’re limited by the speed of the actual hard disks that are set up in our raid. So a huge improvement over USB hard drives, but not as fast as locally attached SSDs. If I wanted to, I could have filled my NAS with SSDs, although it would’ve cost around six times the price based on the amount of storage that I was looking for.
As it is, it’s considerably faster than what we need for the high bit rate video files that we work with, and obviously it has all the additional advantages that we discussed of using a NAS in the first place. So in my book, that’s a win.
Why Synology?
Are Synology DiskStations any good? It’s time for a mini review.
Now, full disclosure, Synology kindly provided us with these disc stations, but we approached them. Also, we did purchase the drives that we put in ourselves.
This is my fourth DiskStation, and I’m still using all the previous ones I’ve purchased in the past. I use them for backups and offsite storage, and I keep on getting more. Personally, I think they’re pretty good for me as an editor. They’re the right mix of value, performance, and convenience.
The best thing about them, in my opinion, is the software. It’s a living, breathing, operating system that Synology continuously updates. It handles all the boring, important stuff that you need to do to protect and access your data seamlessly. Stuff like VPNs, remote access, backup tasks, media servers, and more.
Any Downsides?
Here is my one gripe, though. Synology have always maintained a list of recommended drives for their NAS recently on particular higher end models, this one included. Synology have introduced a warning when a user installs a drive that doesn’t appear on their compatibility list.
Additionally, their compatibility list in this instance is restricted to Synology own branded hard drives, which are considerably more expensive than other suitable alternatives. Now, this move has annoyed a lot of people.
In their defence, there’s good reason to encourage users to use their own drives, increased performance and easy maintenance being two of them.
However, I’m using high quality Seagate Enterprise hard drives in my disc station. There is no need for this warning that appears permanently in my interface. Now, please note it doesn’t affect operation or my warranty in any way. By all means, please warn me, but let me turn the warning off!
Apart from that, it really is a great product and maybe Synology will rectify this issue in the future. In the meantime, it’s not a reason not to buy one, it just needs to be mentioned.
Cost vs other options
So what would this setup cost? I’ve only filled half my bays currently for my 72 terabytes setup with two disk redundancy, it’s cost about $4,200.
How does the cost stack up? To make comparisons easier, we’re gonna compare the cost of 72 terabytes of storage for each solution:
- A pile of USB hard drives costs about $1,320. You’ll get shoddy performance. Only one person can access your files at a time, and there is no redundancy.
- A pile of USB SSDs would cost about $6,840. Now, the performance would be amazing, but I’d need 18 USB ports and without a complicated raid setup, that’ll be separate drives, and of course, they would still be difficult to share.
- A premium RAID Desktop hard drive costs around $4,000-$5,000. Depending on brand and features. You’ll get much better performance with some redundancy, but it can still only be accessed by one person.
- A DIY NAS will cost around $3,000. It’s only going to be slightly cheaper as you’ve still got to spend the same money on the hard drives, and you’re gonna have to spend time building and configuring it.
- Finally, a premium video editing NAS will cost you maybe around $20,000. That’s a lot of money for basically the exact same performance.
When you look at this solution in context, I think it’s good value. Any increase in cost is negated by the extra functionality. I now have a secure, accessible, and reliable storage solution that’s going to serve me for a long time. And if my storage needs grow , I can expand my existing system.
Who Pays For It?
As a professional editor. Every purchase that I make needs to make or save me money, either directly or indirectly by helping me to do my job more effectively. So who pays for all this?
Simply put, the client. If a client books a cinematographer for a shoot, he either has to rent him a camera or pay the cinematographer a fee to use his own camera. As an editor, you have overhead, office base, electricity, computer hardware, software, licenses, and of course storage.
There’s two ways of passing those costs onto your client. They either need to be reflected in your day rate or on a given project. You might charge a modest fixed fee.
Who is this kind of kit appropriate for everyone? It can work for a single freelance editor. It can work for a post house with multiple users. Choose an appropriately sized NAS. Don’t be afraid to get more bays than you need, and then buy as many hard drives as you currently need, and then scale up, add more.
As you grow, it’s easy to overlook storage. If a cinematographer turned up to a shoot with their mobile phone, the client won’t be impressed. They expect you, no, they are paying you to have the appropriate equipment for the kind of work that you take on.
Wrap Up
I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into Storage equipment for editors. Once you’ve sorted your storage setup, head over to our Free Training page to get started with some sample lessons on any topic that you like, from general creative editing, to working with music, cutting action scenes, trailers, promos, and a bunch more.
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