Hello All, 

 

I am going to update my unraid server (with budget in mind) that currently pretty old: i7 920. The new upgrade will need to be able to serve as RAW photos and videos files storage that I will connect with macbook pro via lan for editing. I need to understand what factor that mostly impact the speed of write/read in the server. Is it CPU, RAM, etc?  

 

Regards,

Bondul

Disk speed primarily, maybe network speed if using SSDs. CPU, RAM very unlikely to have any impact by comparison to these.

 

I assume you understand how Unraid realtime parity affects writes to the array.

Yes, I understand how Unraid parity affects. 

Is it possible to edit video or photo files stored in unraid server from other computer via LAN connection? Or it is impossible due to speed issue?

The standard practice, how this usecase works best, is to read the picture files from one share to your local Machine, perform the editing and then write them back to another share.

You macbook pro is equipped with a 10G network I think.

So even when you add a large NVME based cache pool to unraid - and given, that the input and output files will still reside on the cache - the network will be the limiting factor.

Yes it will work this way, even when using remote shares for read/write directly while editing, but it will not give you the same expérience/performance compared to your local Mac. 

A 10G network is faster than a standard SATA 6Gbps SSD, but slower than a PCIe based NVME (which is maybe 20-40 Gbps read/write, depending on model and platform).