Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
NAS experts (or opinionated beginners!): Do I NEED a Thunderbolt drive enclosure if my main purposes for a #NAS are things like backups, self-hosted photos (Immich), a Plex media server, etc?
Bonus question: Do I need Thunderbolt if I decide to use my NAS for video editing?
Thank you in advance for any and all advice. I've seen too many horror stories, and it's time to make this happen.
necrophcodr
@killyourfm USB-C is fine for all of those, even networked is completely fine. It all depends on the speed of the interfaces and cables. USB-C can be USB 2 speeds 480Mb/s, or it can be USB 4 speeds of 40Gbit/s.
Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
@necrophcodr Huh. I don't see ANY scenario where editing video off a max 40Gbit/s networked drive would be problematic. It sounds like the drives would be the bottleneck (especially if they're 6Gbit/s spinning rust).
Thanks for the knowledge.
Joe Ressington
@killyourfm @WelcomeHome external drives are never ideal. You'd be much better off with internal SATA (or NVMe) drives.
Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
@joeress @WelcomeHome I'd be using, at minimum, internal SATA drives in an enclosure like an OWC ThunderBay 4 or something.
Joe Ressington
@killyourfm @WelcomeHome yeah that makes sense. But also if a job's worth doing and all that. 🤷♂️
Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
@joeress @WelcomeHome Also true, but what if you're broke? :)
Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
@joeress @WelcomeHome Ah, I hear you. Well, I'm trying to work with hardware I've got, ya know?
That hardware is currently a Dell Optiplex 3050
with an Intel i5-7500 + 16GB DDR4.
OR a Framework mainboard with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H + 16GB RAM fitted into the Cooler Master mainboard case.
Joe Ressington
@killyourfm @WelcomeHome yeah but I mean inside the actual machine rather than in an external enclosure. For example in an HP minitower.
Joe Ressington
@killyourfm @WelcomeHome also a reasonable point. But also you can get a mini tower that is pre-win11 for under a hundred bucks on ebay.
Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
@joeress @WelcomeHome Hmm. You make a valid point. Spend money on an expensive hard drive bay enclosure, OR just spend money on the tower?
Oh man, this is already overwhelming.
Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
@joeress @WelcomeHome It's for ME, in the end. A box for backups and cold storage, an iCloud replacement, a media server, etc. And a learning experience.
Joe Ressington
@killyourfm @WelcomeHome I guess it depends if you're putting it together for content, or for actual production use.
Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
*Whistle* The more I research the DIY NAS route, the more overwhelmed I feel...
Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
@thibaultamartin Well, I'm certainly intrigued!
Thib
@killyourfm I'm following the "why get a NAS if you can get everything on you laptop anyway" route these days, after spending the summer playing with k8s on a server in my living room 😄
Still need to iron out a few wrinkles before I can publish and make recommendations, but the app maintainers I've reached out to are excellent people.
Free software is really awesome.
necrophcodr
@killyourfm indeed. if you want to edit straight from the NAS, i would recommend one with 10Gbit network port, and make sure devices connected to it do so using 10Gbit networking too. That way there's little chance you'll have any issues with it, it might even be faster than editing locally (although latency could be higher).
The tricky part is finding a good tradeoff of which RAID type to use, and the answer depends on how much you value performance vs security, and which NAS and filesystem.
Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
@joeress @WelcomeHome That sounds fun! My podcast or yours? :)
Joe Ressington
@killyourfm @WelcomeHome we could have a chat about it if you like. Maybe even record it. A sort of "how to even start thinking about putting a NAS together thing". Then you could make some decisions and actually put it together in future content.
Jason Evangelho 🐧🎒
@ewen Ewen, this is INVALUABLE feedback, and I deeply appreciate it! I've been wanting to start learning Davinci Resolve anyway, and I think you've just saved me (and hopefully others) a massive headache or three.
Ewen Bell 📸
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