NAS (Network Storage) / Media Hub, how to? and what kind?

[NickVon]

General scope of this topic to come to some conclusions for an entry level system for storage of Media files (audio/video/recording) with out going the full blown "media server" route.

In general I'm looking for some limitations of some sort of Network storage, possibly attached to our master Media PC via eSATA as the centeral point for ripping audio CD's pulling tracks for Playback in Multiplay/Qlab/Screen monkey/ and as the Recording Dump out of our Saffire Pro40/and Audition.

1) A separate device attached to the network with a RAID of say 500GB or 1 TB drives with redundancy. This device is solely on the network and any show files, .xml settings can be saved to it as a shared drive. Adobe Audition will make it it's "working" drive and record multitrack audio straight to the drives.

2) Similar to the above but, physically attached to what I term the "media PC." It is the desktop attached to our Saffire interface and is the computer most often used for playback of audio and video. A secondary laptop sometime used as secondary audio cueing device would access the files needed through the network.

The Media PC is hardlined on gigabit network locally to the LX console/Audio console/Projector. The secondary media laptop and our presentation laptop is on the wireless branch of our local network. (a quality Cisco AP , A,B,G with high gain antennas)

2 seems like the better option since I believe the data bandwidth between the hard drives and the eSATA would be much greater then then the Network. That said is there any chance of streaming audio to the laptop running multiplay with any kind of satisfactory results using only the network.

Would 7200rpm drives be sufficient for just 2 PC accessing it most of the time. or should 10k rpm drives be the go two standard? Do they make devices that can be both network storage but also physically connected to a PC.

Is any of this even remotely possible with 700$ invested into the HD hardware to have results that don't blow?

Thank you for any input. While i'm very comfortable with networks/computers, and internal computer hardware I am unfamiliar wit hteh application of streaming media across networks and what leads to poor performance or excellent performance.

 

[Clifford]

Either solution would work, and with mostly the same hardware. NAS boxes often have both ethernet and USB/Firewire/eSATA connections so if you find one that does, both solutions are open to you. I don't know whether you can use both network and local connections at the same time since I haven't done that before, but I would be surprised if there were no devices at all that allowed it. The easiest way is usually to buy one that's designed for network storage so that it's already made to run on a network without much configuration. It shouldn't give you much trouble and can be mapped as a network drive. This way you don't have to worry about sharing drives across the network. There are cheap devices out there for a lot less than $700, there are decent ones for $600-700, there are quite good ones for $1,200, and there are enterprise grade for $2,000+. You just have to choose how you want to spend your money.

For the drives, industry best practice would be 15,000rpm SCSI drives, but for this application that sort of I/O isn't necessary; 7200rpm drives will work fine for two computers. Assuming you have a quality motherboard on the serving device, the bandwidth on SATA is (theoretically) 1.5, 3 or 6Gb/s depending on the version (192, 384, or 768MB/s, respectively). The network is going to be the bottleneck there, since GigE is only 128MB/s. Over wireless G it's even less, about 6.75MB/s. Think about it this way, DSL internet connections are even less than wireless G, but people can still stream music, YouTube, netflix, etc over the connection without a problem. You shouldn't have issues with bandwidth over a local network unless you start trying to push anything over 1080p.

 

[DuckJordan]

Think of it this way do you want to have the main comp on to access the files? If no then go network. A gigabit network won't be much slower, at least noticably, than a esata or usb connection.

Sent from my ADR6300 using Tapatalk

 

[headcrab]

For your NAS box, get a halfways decent computer, and load FreeNAS. Make sure the motherboard has or supports a Gigabit LAN adapter.
I have transferred data at 100MB/s over our Gigabit LAN here at school. (both computers are running 3Gb/s SATA drives.)

You could probably do that for less than $500.

 

[BurkeTheJerk]

Adobe Audition will make it it's "working" drive and record multitrack audio straight to the drives.

Be careful with this as network speed, lag, hiccups, etc. can affect your performance in an undesirable way.

 

[NickVon]

Be careful with this as network speed, lag, hiccups, etc. can affect your performance in an undesirable way.

Doesn't Audition Buffer in Ram then Write to disk as the disk becomes availible. Meaning that if for some reason the network hiccups it 'll just hold on to the data until it's clear for writing. Though that fear is what makes me like the alternative to connect it straight the PC as well as the network.

@ HEADCRAB, thanks for the "FreeNAS" insight, I actually have a PC at home taking up space that i can try this with, and see If the bandwith enters in to the equation as a problem before forking over any money on this project.

 

[BurkeTheJerk]

Though that fear is what makes me like the alternative to connect it straight the PC as well as the network.

Another option would be to save it locally first then transfer it to network storage for back up.