JNM

Thank you everyone for the replies and information! Currently, the NAS is primarily part of the backup workflow and won’t require extensive uptime for this project. To improve read speeds and minimize spin times, I’m testing a 2.5" 1TB SSD cache drive (a Samsung 860 EVO I’ve had since this PC was used for rendering/backups—it’s still in good health). I’m considering adding a larger cache drive in the future, but that would mainly be for smaller projects, since a full film would move through the cache quickly. What OS would you suggest? The NAS is built on an older editing PC from the Intel 6th-gen era, which is why I’m testing Unraid. I believe 36 TB will cover the current film—I doubt I’ll reach 24 TB, though I may come close once shooting wraps. I’ll also be using these drives for future projects, as there should be plenty of room left—unless another setup would be better. As a follow-up on scaling: in my situation, is it better to expand the pool of drives within a single array/RAID, or to create multiple RAIDs? My projects don’t share assets or footage—if I’m working on multiple films at once, they remain separate. Once finished, most projects move into archival (LTO's for longevity). However, if this turns into a docuseries or needs additional support for years for whatever reason, I plan to keep footage on these drives for 4–5 years before fully offloading. If a project remains active beyond that, the NAS would serve as the main hub for the footage, with only the bulk media offloaded from the M.2 drives. It’s difficult to predict future client needs, so I've gone down the archival road, but that may not be the best use of the NAS and I'm wide open to correction. Is RAIDZ1 like RAID 5? If using striped drives like this, would they get sustain read speeds of a SSD like 400 mb. They internal cache of the drive starts actually hits 700-800 mb, but then drops to the 200's once that has filled up. Any ideas of why I'm only seeing speeds between 150-180 mb? I've been thinking the slower write speeds where due to parity writing as well as writing to the HDD. Is that not the case?

Thank you for the quick reply and the pros and cons list. I initially prioritized both archiving and parity protection, but now I'm having doubts— the slow transfer speeds are starting to be a bottleneck, which I'm wondering if that will be a problem later as my needs grow past what my editing rig can maintain internally. Currently the array is get around 150 MB/s when using parity protection, is that normal? For context, I’m currently copying footage at ~150 MB/s, whereas individual drives were capable of hitting ~280 MB/s before I enabled parity. I have added an image showing the settings for the parity setup. Do you have any suggestions that can speed this guy up?

Hey everyone, Sorry if this question has been asked before—it probably has. I’m new to Unraid, and I used ChatGPT to help set up my rig and wrap my head around some of the basics of NAS storage. I’m a professional filmmaker working on a project that currently has about 16 TB of footage. The footage is high quality and low compression. generally around 280mbs reads and up to 800mbs depending on if it was Braw or not. My current setup is: 3x Seagate IronWolf Pro 18TB drives in the Unraid array (one parity, two data = ~36 TB usable) 1x 1TB SSD cache drive (2.5, not m.2) 1x 16TB HDD (separate from the array, used for other storage) Old PC hardware: ASUS Maximus Extreme VIII, 64 GB RAM, running Unraid 10 ghz network connection My editing PC has 20 TB of M.2 SSD storage dedicated to this project The NAS is primarily for storage and archival—not live editing—though I might occasionally edit directly from it if my PC storage is tied up (like now). In my industry, we follow the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies of the footage 2 copies stored locally (my editing PC and the NAS) 1 copy stored off-site (external drive in a different location) Right now, my Unraid setup uses standard parity for the 3x 18TB drives. I’m starting to wonder if I should reconfigure into RAID 5 (or something similar) for more speed, since I’m not editing from it full time. Given my workflow, would you recommend sticking with Unraid’s single-parity setup, or moving to a RAID 5 configuration? I’m open to other suggestions as well. What do you NAS pros think?