Purchasing the first QNAP

English General
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“But yeah, one sequence, let’s say 4 sec - 25fps gives us 100 exr images, and considering that the animation takes a few minutes, that requires management and speed, not even mentioning the space.”

you see - it’s all in the details. You are working with EXR Image Sequences - so if you followed my advice with the TVS-h874, it STILL would not work. 8 SATA drives will not play back EXR Image Sequences - these are very difficult file formats to play back (think about Arri RAW) - on QNAP’s with SATA drives that I have built, and now the client wants to play back EXR Image Sequences, and then calls me to complain that “nothing is working” - what I have done is to install a QNAP QM2-4P-384 card with four M.2 NVMe drives, and THAT will play back anything. Flash drives are dramatically faster than SATA drives. Here is where MB/sec means nothing, and IOPS means everything. So a cheap way of doing this, is to get a QNAP TBS-h574TX, for $1200, and install five Samsung EVO 990 (with heatsinks) 4TB drives. After RAID 5 and 10% over provisioning, this will give you 14 TB of usable space, and now you can play back anything without stuttering playback. I have never tried 8TB M.2 NVMe drives in this model (QNAP has not certified the cheaper ones like the Western Digital Black drives) - but that would give you closer to 30 TB of usable storage IF the 8TB drives worked (I don’t know - I never went beyond 4 TB drives).
Its all in the details ! Glad you mentioned EXR Image sequences, because you would have bought the TVS-h874 with 8 drives, and just come back here, and cursed me for having to spend all that money, and it still was not working.

Bob Zelin

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Thank you @Bob , I spent some time reading/watching about that particular NAS, and it looks like a great solution indeed.
But now I want to ask you. As I understand, the major limitation of that solution is the maximum storage space you can have, and the ability to expand, right?
How many people do you think can use TBS-h574TX simultaneously? I’m wondering now, why does it have the same price as let’s say TVS-h474-PT-8G, which is four bay, without 10 GbE connection, and as I understood from the previous answers, it would be a much slower solution. Is it only about the storage space I should be worried about, or is there something I should bear in mind if I were to purchase TBS one?
@dolbyman mentioned that there is some configuration where 10GbE makes sense, and it would be the solution that you used in your case by adding the NVMes slots to your NAS. Is that something worth considering? Or it would be only more expensive, giving worse result?

I think I could say that my job is quite hybrid, which means that working on Davinci with EXR sequences is not the only job I’m doing, Most of the time now I need to work in 3D (3ds max or other 3d software), and deal with a heavy 3d assets and bitmaps in the scene, and then render it (either as an animation sequence or single image). But as I understand correctly, once I open the 3D scene on my machine, and I load the asset from the library (both scene and all the assets/bitmaps would be in NAS), the job for the disc is done, because it doesn’t load that all the time, but cache it only once when I open the scene.
I’m only mentioning that because I’m thinking about a hybrid solution now, based on what you’ve already said. What if I would purchase the 6 bay NAS (e.g.TVS-h674), where I would keep my assets and projects, and only the EXR data I would store on the extension NVMes slots ( I would purchase them separate, with 4TB drives ), would it be a solution for something, or it’s just too much of a hassle and work around, and after all it would never reach 10GBe anyways and playback speed.

I know already that a four-bay NAS for what I want is not gonna work.
I would like to have an ideal 10 GbE speed, and work with three people simultaneously.

After all 14 TB, which TBS offers, would be perfectly fine in terms of the storage space for now, so it seems like the most reasonable NAS.

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Hi -
I have installed a LOT of TBS-h574TX units. I have never had more than 4 people connect to this at one time (using a QNAP QSW-M3216R-8S8T 10G switch - all client computers were 10G) - and there were NO issues with performance. I use five Samsung 990 EVO 4TB drives with Heatsinks (the model that comes from Samsung with the built in heat sink) - and I have had zero problems. Could it take more than 4 clients - I assume so, M.2 drives are dramatically faster than SATA drives, but I personally never tried it. There was someone on Reddit’s QNAP forum recently that started to test the Western Digital 8 TB M.2 NVMe drives in the TBS-h574TX, but he stopped posting, so I have no idea of what is success is. With five 4TB M.2 NVMe drives in RAID 5 and over provisioning, you get about 14 TB of usable storage.
Is it expandable - NO. I have asked QNAP to build a bigger unit, (more M.2 slots) but they have not done this. They keep coming out with SSD models (like the TS-h1277AFX) - but 8 TB SSD’s are very expensive, and the U.2 Models, like the TS-h1290FX - well, those U.2 drives are just CRAZY expensive (about $1000 for a 7.68 TB U.2 drive) - so I am unhappy that there is not a larger version of the TBS-h574TX.

I have no idea if you could put a QM2 card in the TVS-h674. when you build a TVS-h674 or TVS-h874, the M.2 slots are really for the QuTS OS (storage Pool 1). I have spoken about this a little with QNAP, and they said that I could split this up, where I put in larger 4 TB M.2 NVMe’s, assign 500 gig to the OS, and use the rest of the space for high speed data (like EXR) - but I have never done this. What I have done, is install a QM2-4P-384 card in products like the TVS-h1688X, where I can have 200 TB of SATA storage using 20 TB Seagate EXOS or Ironwolf Pro drives, and put in the QM2 card with four 4TB M.2 NVMe drives, in RAID 0, and now have 16 TB of super fast M.2 NVMe storage, and just use QNAP Hybrid Backup Sync to backup the RAID 0 Storage Pool (the QM2 card) every night to the SATA drives, in case I have a M.2 drive failure. That works great. I did this, because I built a TVS-h1688X for a client in California. He was doing ProRes 4K editing, and it worked great - he called me, and said “I can’t play anything back” - and I said “what changed?” - and he said “this is an EXR Image Sequence job, and nothing will play back”. And that was with TWELVE SATA DRIVES. The QM2 card with the M.2 drives solved everything.
Bob Zelin