First time FreeNAS builder / Storage for video editing

[cloud06]

Hey everyone!

I've spent many days reading about FreeNAS, different configurations, hardware suggestions and requirements etc. After all this reading I am pretty certain that FreeNAS is the way to go for what I need.

Anyways - I am running small production and postproduction company in Croatia. We have one grading and one editing bay. We will probably add another assistant editors workstation by the 06/2019. Our grading station is custom built PC with 10gbe (Intel X550), and editing station is trashcan Mac Pro with 2x gigabit ethernet. My plan is to upgrade Mac to 10Gbe.

I need NAS as central storage for grading, editing and transcoding video files. During the day editing station will mostly be used with local storage, and when not used for editing it will be rendering DCPs, transcoding video files etc. I would like to be able to read and write to NAS at the same time. Next to that I would like to have grading station that can read from NAS at the same time... Is this too much to ask from single FreeNAS?

I plan to use this hardware:
8x 6TB Seagate IronWolf in RAIDz2
Supermicro MBD-X11SSH-CTF-O
Xeon E3-1225 v6
32GB ECC RAM
Fractal Design Node 804
450W power supply

+ small Synology with 2x 10TB mirrored drives for backing up master files and uploading to cloud backup
+ 10gbe switch, probably popular Netgear unmanaged one...


What kind of performance I can expect from 8x 6TB IronWolfs in RAIDz2? What happens when I have reading and writing at the same time? Would I be better of with striped 2x RAIDz1 (4x 6TB)?


Thank you all in advance for any help!

 

[sokoloff]

For a single RAIDz2 vdev (of any number of disks), you can expect random read and random write IOPS of whatever 1 drive can give you.
For streaming reads/writes you can expect 8-2 (6 in this case, number of drives minus parity level) times whatever 1 drive can give you for streaming read/write.

For 2x RAIDz1 vdev, you can expect read and write IOPS of 2 times what 1 drive can give you.
For streaming reads/writes, you can expect 2 times what each individual vdev can give you, which will be 3 times what a single drive can give you. In this case, it also solves to 6.

If you go to 4x a 2 drive mirror, you can expect random read of 8 * 1 drive, random write of 4 * 1 drive, and streaming read of 8 * 1 drive, streaming write of 4 * 1 drive.

More details here and here. I believe I got it right above, but if I didn't, assume that IX Systems knows more than me and I made a mistake.

 

[Chris Moore]

My plan is to upgrade Mac to 10Gbe.

How?

 

[cloud06]

How?

Hi! I plan to upgrade Mac probably using Sonnet Twin. But, to be honest, most of the work that I will be doing on that editing machine can be done over gigabit I think... Because Mac also has 9TB RAID5 DAS over thunderbolt.