TrueNAS and Final Cut Pro

[digiwolf]

Hi Community –
I wanted your thoughts on direction of travel, based on my needs, as I can't make up my mind...
I've started a tiny YouTube channel with 4K footage, with my MacPro (Late 2013 model; Trashcan) being absolutely maxxed out.
I thought to buy some external SSDs to edit footage via Final Cut Pro with the Library either on each SSD or on the Mac. However, I feel that this is a high-risk business with no redundancy. My ideal scenario would have been to take all footage from various SSDs and cameras, copy them into a NAS that could connect via Thunderbolt to my Mac, edit the footage via SMB and when I finish, back-up the projects to Backblaze. Also, running my own NextCloud seems VERY appealing.
Has my logic any major flaws? If not, what kind of build should I be looking towards? I don't think I'll need more than 12-24TBs at this early stage, but I'm interested in expanding. Thoughts?

 

[Samuel Tai]

Other than Thunderbolt connectivity, this is a promising plan. TrueNAS Core doesn't really have any Thunderbolt drivers in-kernel. If that's a must, then you should look into OpenZFS on Mac, so you could create a pool on your Mac with a Thunderbolt external enclosure. Once you've moved your data onto the enclosure, you could export the pool, and then move the drives over to a TrueNAS box, and import them there.

 

[digiwolf]

Other than Thunderbolt connectivity, this is a promising plan. TrueNAS Core doesn't really have any Thunderbolt drivers in-kernel. If that's a must, then you should look into OpenZFS on Mac, so you could create a pool on your Mac with a Thunderbolt external enclosure. Once you've moved your data onto the enclosure, you could export the pool, and then move the drives over to a TrueNAS box, and import them there.

Thanks for your swift response, Samuel. MUCH appreciated. This is a great suggestion –having an external enclosure for max speeds is appealing. I should be able to 'package' the projects and move them to TrueNAS once I'm done via OpenZFS on Mac? How 'automated' could this process be? Does it happen in real-time or would I need a scheduler? Cheers!

 

[Samuel Tai]

As this involves physically moving drives between systems, this is a manual process.

 

[dak180]

My ideal scenario would have been to take all footage from various SSDs and cameras, copy them into a NAS that could connect via Thunderbolt to my Mac, edit the footage via SMB and when I finish, back-up the projects to Backblaze. Also, running my own NextCloud seems VERY appealing.

The one thing to keep in mind is that the N in NAS stands for network which thunderbolt is not, nor is TrueNAS a DAS (D for direct); that said, you certainly could get a thunderbolt to 10 gig network adaptor and do things that way.

 

[ChrisRJ]

If you want to edit videos off your future NAS, this will have a considerable impact on the specification and price. Is that a true requirement or more of a nice-to-have? Also, what is your budget?

 

[digiwolf]

Thank you all for your answers that helped me understand that I would probably need a DAS at this stage, rather a NAS. Could you point me to the right direction in terms of building my own custom DAS build? I would like to avoid buying one of the QNAP or Synology boxes that are harder to expand...