I keep hearing about NAS but it sounds expensive and intensive... Can you give me the photography, every man breakdown.
It's generally expensive and is not something I would recommend to everyone.
First I would ask about your use cases: Are you creating content professionally? Is this a full time job or something you want to become a full time job? How long do you intend to keep raw files and why? How important is it for you to work from more than one computer?
I'm real big on making practical moves, especially given this field of work leans heavily into the constant feeling of missing out if you don't have the latest and greatest lens, gimbal, camera body, light, etc.
I'll tell you why I made the move to a NAS solution and hopefully that helps you make the right decision for yourself.
I own my own marketing agency/production company.
When I started out about 4 years ago, the only camera I owned was a Panasonic GH5.
Shooting in 4k/60p the file sizes of my projects averaged around 300 GB.
I started out with a 4TB external and I would also use the 1TB internal on my iMac.
As my client base grew and projects became more frequent I needed more space. I always bought "just enough" which resulted in my having 5 4TB externals. Not the end of the world, but locating projects became a mild hassle as I would be plugging and unplugging hard drives to find footage frequently.
The big turning point for me was the purchase of my RED Komodos.
My average project size now is 750 GB and the work keeps coming in.
That coupled with the new dilemma of me only being one person I began to sub-contract friends to help with edits.
This put me in a situation where if I was going to have people come in and work, I needed to have a proper workstation for them; but there was no way in the world we would be able to be productive if we were passing external hard drives back and forth; and what if we both needed access to footage that was on one particular drive?
This is where I went down the rabbit hole of researching a solution where 2 computers would be able to access 6K resolution files, and both computers would be able to actively pull that footage and edit off of a single drive. The biggest challenge you run into aside from cost is bandwidth. A NAS was the perfect solution for me. I didn't approach the decision based on any need to archive footage. I honestly extremely rarely archive raw footage and when I do it's only for very specific clients and very specific projects. I'm in the business of shooting NEW content, not going back into year old content for x,y,z, reasons. If I need to do some kind of "year in review" for a client, I typically pull from the finished videos, which those, I do keep every single one.
I use a QNAP TS-H973AX with 5 drives totaling 90TB of space.
I believe the total cost was around $2K if I'm not mistaken.
This was the video that sold it for me:
There's a lot more technical info I could share if you have any specific questions or concerns.
I would say long story short:
A NAS gives you the storage space of multiple drives using only one of your computer's ports.
It can be quite expensive however, you can start with one drive and add drives to the NAS as your needs increase to mitigate the up front costs.
If you are using multiple computers make sure you have a 10g ethernet port, the proper cables, and switches to support it, otherwise, you are very likely going to have serious performance issues.
You do have the option of maintaining data redundancy automatically if you need it. It may shock people to hear I use a NAS and don't implement any redundancy but like I said, I shoot for the project, and if I need old footage I'll take it from a finished video and not from the raw footage since it just isn't practically at all to archive RED RAW 6K footage.
Black Friday/cyber Monday caught me.
