Hey guys,

 

I have a YouTube channel that is doing pretty well. I need to optimize my workflow so I can spend more time editing, and less time rendering/manually managing storage space.

 

I am new to unRAID (or any NAS/server). I plan to build a system that will host the footage I record. The server will also handle rendering jobs to keep my editing workstation free for me to continue editing. At the moment I am not encoding the footage, but this may be a requirement down the road.

 

In an ideal world, I would edit the video files from the server over a LAN connection with my editing workstation. 1 GigE may not be enough bandwidth for this task. If that is the case, I would use an SSD drive on my editing system to temporarily store the footage for editing. A down the road solution would be 10 GigE.

 

Rendering on the server would require a windows VM to run a second copy of my editing software. This is the only way I think this can be done, I have yet to see a more elegant workflow for a video editing/render farm.

 

My budget is anywhere around $1-2K. I'm going to start small (a few drives, no SATA card, single stick of RAM ect...) and upgrade as my needs grow.

 

Here's my plan:

• Case: Norco 4220
  
• Motherboard: SuperMicro MBD-X11SSA-F-O
  
• CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1275 3.6Ghz
  
• Power Supply: SeaSonic SS-750KM3
  
• Memory: Samsung 16GB ECC M393A2G40DB0-CPB
  
• Hard Drives: WD Red Pro 6TB
  

 

I just want to be sure that I'm making the right move here. Render time is unimportant for me on the server as long as my editing machine is freed up - so is it even beneficial to be going with the faster E3? I could save a few bucks and go with a slower E3. Or - an option would be to go up to an E5 with more cores and a slower clock speed.

 

Some ideas/feedback would be nice. I'd like to order the parts soon so I can get this rolled out.

 

Thanks!

Hmm, interesting use case.  I wish I has more experience with video editing, I'm more familiar with a photo editing workflow.  A couple of thoughts, though.

 

Have you run a power supply calculator on 20 drives, though?  The Seasonic has 62A on the 12v rail and I know the Red Pros are efficient but that's worth confirming. 

 

I assume you know that's a big rack mount case...

 

If rendering time isn't important then it seems like you could drop back on the CPU.  Even a lower Xeon has lots of horsepower to spare beyond basic NAS duties.  Whether it's worth moving to an E5 depends on your rendering software.  If it multi-processes well (spools up multiple threads) then more cores is good.  If it only uses one/a couple of threads then the faster core speed is preferred.  Video rendering generally does take advantage of multi-processing, fwiw.  The performance of an E3 Xeon is generally similar to a comparably spec'd Core i5/7, so you can use that as a frame of reference.  E5 takes things to another level if your software supports the cores, but at increased cost.

 

Does your rendering software take advantage of a GPU?  If so, you want to plan your hardware pass-through requirements carefully.

 

The RAM you linked is Registered ECC DDR4, and that motherboard takes Unbuffered ECC.  E5 supports Registered.