Video Editing Server

[Riddick]

We are looking for a NAS System for a very small video production company with 1-2 Video editors. I think the freenas is a good solution and not too expensive.
We hope we can reach around 700Megabytes per second transfer speed for Adobe Premiere pro. We need raid solution because the amount of Data is increasing around 6tb per Month for the next half year.

I was reading a lot of Freenas and the hardware specs. For me it's totaly new.
The Plan is to direct attache the network cable for 10Gbe. Something similar to the 45Drive Storinator
The Budget is maximum 6000usd but we don't want to waste money.
The goal is to work from the NAS directly with Premiere Pro, the NAS provides the Media Files. The editing machine is a Windows 10 PC

Because of the small Budget, my fried was looking for the Storinator with only 5x16tb disks but i guess 5 disks are not enough to get the speed.
Before we spend the monay for all the harddrives, i am thinking to build a system with 8 cheap 2TB HDDs.

But this is the config. I hope it's good enough. Any recommendations?

1	X11SPL-F
1	Intel Xeon silver Scalable Processors 2.10 GHz 8core
2	Kingston 32GB DDR4 2400MHz Reg ECC CL17
1	Fractal Define 7 XL
2	10GBe X540-T2 Adapter
6-8	Seagate Hard disk Exos X16 SATA 3.5 16 TB

 

[Jessep]

You would be better off with two pools, a work in progress pool and an archive pool.

WIP would be Striped Mirrors of SSD and the archive would be HDD.

Be sure to get SSD with PLP and 1-3 DWPD. Consumer SSD drives are not really suitable for this in a production setting.

You will also want to get a good quality UPS with network shutdown to further protect from data loss.

In addition you will want to think about backup, RAID is not backup. At the very least read up on 3-2-1 backup strategy.

 

[Basil Hendroff]

I'm not a h/w expert, but a couple of things you may wish to consider:

1. As I understand it max capacity and max performance are not mutually exclusive. There are trade-offs and you have to decide what's important for video editing. So, your storage design is crucial; whether you use mirrors or RAIDZ or a combination of the two. Someone who has an intimate understanding of this will be able to advise you further. Having 6-8 HDDs doesn't really cut it. I suggest you review some of the excellent resources that are available on this forum e.g.

1. Uncle Fester's FreeNAS Beginner's Guide
2. Introduction to ZFS
3. Some differences between RAIDZ and mirrors, and why we use mirrors for block storage
4. Picking a ZFS Pool Layout to Optimize Performance
5. Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC for noobs!

2. Be aware that disk redundancy is not a substitute for a reliable backup strategy. You can't just rely on your storage design to safeguard your data. You need to consider how you are going to maintain business continuity in the event of catastrophic h/w failure, and more importantly, catastrophic data loss. What you've described thus far, doesn't begin to address either of these.

 

[Riddick]

You would be better off with two pools, a work in progress pool and an archive pool.

WIP would be Striped Mirrors of SSD and the archive would be HDD.

Be sure to get SSD with PLP and 1-3 DWPD. Consumer SSD drives are not really suitable for this in a production setting.

You will also want to get a good quality UPS with network shutdown to further protect from data loss.

In addition you will want to think about backup, RAID is not backup. At the very least read up on 3-2-1 backup strategy.

Sounds interessting!
They use a cloud for Archive the old Data. At the Moment the Data is growing because of some projects in the next months. 10 to 20 tb in the next 2 Weeks from one project.
If we know the plan is working, we can start with 10 HDDs in a Raid, but not Raid 0. I have to read about the Raids an test it. At the moment i have no chance to setup and test the NAS.
At the Moment my friend is using a Lacie 2big 10tb Raid 0, with around180mb/s. It's a bad system and he need something better.

 

[Arvi LEFEVRE]

I've built a freenas server for my brother, there are 3 editors working on it. It's a stripe of 2 raid z2, 6 drives each, 12 TB per drive. It's not optimal for the storage available, but it's more than enough, it's fast, and more or less safe (it's still backed up every night in a B2 storage). This would not be full (but getting close to ^^) after 1 year of getting 6 TB per month.

But it did cost more than 6000 usd. There are 256 GB ECC Ram, 1 TB nvm2 drive for L2ARC (I want to use the HDD as little as possible), CPU is a epyc with 16 cores, and 2*10 Gbe lan. Write speed is 1,1 GB/s, maxed out, read was a bit less somehow, 700 MB/s when in cache (but I think I can improve that with some settings), and 300-400 MB/s when reading from HDD. It did cost something like 10k usd, could get cheaper with less ram, cheaper CPU, no L2ARC, but you want enough cache, so your editors won't have to read all the time from HDD. Also, in the config, everything is server grade, including the nvme drive, samsung pm983.

 

[Riddick]

I recently finished the configuration with my first freenas server. We used 6 x 12tb iron wolf pro SATA HDD.
My Question, i saw the server is using almost all RAM. Should we use more RAM for better performance?

 

[MikeyG]

@Riddick It will always use all the RAM you've got for ARC. At 64GB, if performance is what you need, leave it alone. If you are using it for video editing large files, then the larger the ARC, then the more data can be read from it and not the drives themselves. More is always better, but to determine exactly how useful it would be you need to study up on ARC hit rates and start learning to read the statistics that FreeNAS provides. You can also make some educated guesses based on workload. For example if you are editing the same couple of 4GB videos, then those will likely fit into ARC already. However, if you've got say 20 different 10GB videos you are always editing, then more memory for ARC is more likely to help.

 

[Riddick]

@Riddick It will always use all the RAM you've got for ARC. At 64GB, if performance is what you need, leave it alone. If you are using it for video editing large files, then the larger the ARC, then the more data can be read from it and not the drives themselves. More is always better, but to determine exactly how useful it would be you need to study up on ARC hit rates and start learning to read the statistics that FreeNAS provides. You can also make some educated guesses based on workload. For example if you are editing the same couple of 4GB videos, then those will likely fit into ARC already. However, if you've got say 20 different 10GB videos you are always editing, then more memory for ARC is more likely to help.

If it's possible to get more speed, then it's fine :)
I think we have to extend the NAS very soon, maybe it makes sense to add more RAM very soon, because anyway we will install another 40TB theuntil end of the year.
The amount of growing data of a RED Gemini 5k RAW is crazy

 

[MikeyG]

If you are working with large files like that, then yeah I'd add as much RAM as is reasonable for you budget wise.

 

[Riddick]

The ARC Hit Ratio is always around 98%. I try to understand.

 

[Riddick]

Everything works very good but we have a little problem with lags after short breaks. It looks like the Iron Wolf pro are parking the heads and if we start editing the footage after a few minutes, we have a lag and if we are not carefully the editing software crashes.
Is it possible to do something? Can we fix the "Lag"?
We are also thinking about to add a SDD Volume in the future

 

[Riddick]

I've built a freenas server for my brother, there are 3 editors working on it. It's a stripe of 2 raid z2, 6 drives each, 12 TB per drive. It's not optimal for the storage available, but it's more than enough, it's fast, and more or less safe (it's still backed up every night in a B2 storage). This would not be full (but getting close to ^^) after 1 year of getting 6 TB per month.

But it did cost more than 6000 usd. There are 256 GB ECC Ram, 1 TB nvm2 drive for L2ARC (I want to use the HDD as little as possible), CPU is a epyc with 16 cores, and 2*10 Gbe lan. Write speed is 1,1 GB/s, maxed out, read was a bit less somehow, 700 MB/s when in cache (but I think I can improve that with some settings), and 300-400 MB/s when reading from HDD. It did cost something like 10k usd, could get cheaper with less ram, cheaper CPU, no L2ARC, but you want enough cache, so your editors won't have to read all the time from HDD. Also, in the config, everything is server grade, including the nvme drive, samsung pm983.

At the moment we have some problems. After a working day of filming, while copying of large amount of data (1-1.5tb) to the system, the Editor is not able to edit on his machine, because of slower transfer speeds. Any ideas for an solution? :D

 

[Arvi LEFEVRE]

They haven't told me about an issue like that. They don't often have more than 1TB per day though, and I think they usually put on the NAS at the end of the day. But writing on the disk will for sure slow you down if you read at the same time.