Every couple of years, our network access storage (NAS) gets nearly full of old photoshoots and video projects. Today, I am installing our biggest system yet, and it can hold a whopping 160 TB of data. Oh, and it's also 10 GbE, which allows us to edit video projects directly off the network.
Over the years, we have owned quite a few different NAS options. My first experience with a large storage array was with a Drobo storage system. They recently went bankrupt in 2023, and that system always seemed to give me connection and drive problems throughout my wedding photography career. Back when Lee and I started Fstoppers, we moved over to a true storage system that could be accessed through our business network. There are a ton of options for NAS products, but instead of building our own and leaving room for our own errors, we decided on a Synology system. Synology offers products that are pretty turnkey-ready, and their customer service has always been quick to help us out if something pops up.
The first NAS system we had in the Fstoppers office was the DS1817 8 bay drive system. Then we added an expansion pack, the Synology DX517, to give us a little more storage. Then we moved over to the Synology RS18017xs+ system, which, looking back, was a bit overkill for our needs. If you want to read about that install, here is the Fstoppers RS18017xs+ article is here, but keep in mind, that unit has since been updated by Synology. Well, recently we filled that unit up, and so for our next network access storage, we wanted something that wasn't as industrial as the rack system but gave us more storage than the DS1817 system.
That's where the Synology DS3622sx+ comes in. This is one of the most robust storage options Synology offers before jumping into their true enterprise-grade systems. This drive enclosure holds 12 SATA hard drives, comes with 16 GB of DDR4 ECC RAM, has 2 10 GbE ethernet jacks already installed, and runs on a fast 2.2 GHz Intel Xeon D-1531 Six-Core processor. Without having to add any extra components, this workhorse would be perfect for most photographers and videographers looking for a storage solution that not only gives them drive protection but also allows them to edit and work directly off the device without having to move files over to their computer.
Plus Series Hard Drives
Of course, once you buy any NAS enclosure, you are going to need to fill it full of hard drives. Depending on what size drives you purchase and what RAID configuration you set up, you can get anywhere from 80 - 200 TB of storage. In the past, and with some of Synology's other NAS enclosures, you could buy any model of hard drive from Synology's compatibility list and simply fill the system up. Recently, Synology has made a rather controversial decision to only support and recommend their own proprietary drives, the Synology Plus Series Hard Drives, which are made by Toshiba.
At the time of this article, the Western Digital 12 TB Gold drive is retailing at $279 and a comparable 12 TB Iron Wolf drive by Seagate is selling for $259. The Synology Plus Series 12TB Drive is currently $279 each, which isn't as big of a deal as some people online make it out to be. The advantage of the Synology-branded hard drives is that you can update each hard drive's firmware directly from the Synology DiskStation Manager without having to remove the drives, and Synology also warranties all of their drives directly, so you aren't having to go through another manufacturer's RMA department while the two companies try to place blame on each other. With a system like this that easily runs upwards of $5,000, spending an extra $240 for Synology's Plus Series drives might be worth the saved headache down the road.
That Sweet 10 GBe Speed
One of the biggest advantages to owning a NAS in the first place is being able to store your images and videos on a RAID system but then also being able to edit from it directly. My old DROBO system, and most USB-connected devices, are way too slow to edit off of directly and require files to be transferred back and forth from your workstation to your backup data solution. Even connecting your computer to a NAS that is using the standard 1 Gb ethernet connection is not fast enough to allow snappy, real-time editing in programs like Adobe Premiere, After Effects, and sometimes even Photoshop.
That's where a 10 GBe connection comes in. This connection looks just like your normal RJ45 connection, but it is 10x faster than a typical 1 GB connection. If you have a desktop computer and have installed something like the Sonnet 10GBe PCI ethernet adapter, you can immediately start using 10 GBe simply by connecting a high speed Cat5/6/7 cable between your computer and your NAS. If you bought an older Synology NAS that doesn't offer this faster connection, most of their units have a PCI expansion slot that you can plug in the Synology 10GBe PCI expansion adapter and effectively upgrade the speed of your drive. In the case of this new Synology DS3622sx+ system, it has two 10GBe connections, which we can use link aggregation to bond both ports and have a total of 20 GbE of bandwidth. Doing this won't increase our read/write speeds, but it will help keep fast connections when multiple computers start pulling demanding data across the network, so definitely bond the connection if you are also streaming movies, gaming, or have other staff editing 4K footage and batching RAW files.
If you are trying to edit off your laptop which doesn't have either a 2.5 GBe or 10 GBe ethernet adapter built in, you can use a simple 2.5 GBe USB 3 adapter to slightly speed up your workflow, or if you want the full 10 GBe capability, unfortunately, you are going to have to splurge with something like the OWC 10GBe Thunderbolt 3 adapter in order to make the most of your 10 GBe NAS device.
Don't Forget Your Switch
Speaking of bonded connections and having multiple people editing from your NAS, if you don't already have a 10 GbE switch that allows multiple connections, now is the time to upgrade that too. As I said earlier, you can immediately start using a 10 GbE connection between your computer and NAS simply by connecting them together with no other device between them. But if you want to make your NAS accessible to anyone on your network, you will have to place a 10 GbE-compatible switch between them.
Although you can find smaller switches with just 2-4 10 GBe connections, I personally recommend biting the bullet and getting a managed switch that has 4-8 10 GBe connections so you are ready for additional high-speed connections. I recommend the Netgear MS510TXPP 8 Port Gigabit switch because it has Power Over Ethernet and gives you more configurations as it's a managed switch. Of course, you can also connect a slower and cheaper 1 Gb multi-port switch to your network so you can plug up slower devices like printers, Wi-Fi access points, and other less demanding connections.
Once everything is hooked up correctly, you should see a dramatic increase in both read and write speeds between your computer and NAS. With a slower 1 Gb connection, at best, you will see transfer speeds of 125 MBps (but often even slower). With a properly connected 10 GbE connection, you theoretically can reach transfer speeds of up to 1,250 MBps. The bottleneck will now probably be with your NAS and computer's hard drives, but you should see speeds around 300-500 MBps.
For the photographer or videographer, this upgrade alone can save you so much time and frustration. If you use the fastest USB-C memory card readers and fast V60 or V90 Sandisk Memory cards, you can now easily transfer multiple cards from a shoot to your NAS in minutes instead of hours. Rendering and lag-free playback in Premiere makes editing videos from your NAS a pleasure, and editing and exporting from Lightroom and Photoshop are now as fast as ever. In fact, once you move to a workflow system this quick, you might find yourself constantly checking all your read/write speeds on different devices and accessories simply because it makes such a big difference in performance.
Conclusion
So what do I think now that I've had the new Synology DS3622xs+ up and running for a few weeks now? It's no shock that it runs as seamlessly as the other devices we have had, and unlike the rack system, which was incredibly noisy, this NAS is as quiet as the others in our tech closet. The QuickConnect system allows us to remotely access all of our files no matter where we might be in the world, and the Synology DiskStation Manager OS is super intuitive and easy to use.
Whether you are expanding, upgrading, or, heaven forbid, replacing your old NAS array, it's never a cheap process, but as I said earlier, it's best to do it right and build out something that will fit your needs longer than you think than to install a system that gets filled up too quickly. If you want to see how to initiate and install all the software for this Synology NAS build, check out the video above. If you have any questions or want to share your own experiences with a Synology NAS or perhaps one you've built yourself, feel free to leave me a comment below.
Synology has a really large price premium, but in terms of core NAS functionality, they are one of the easiest to use, especially when it comes to expanding storage.
Only issue is from a hardware standpoint, the pricing is very high compared to building a PC to use as a NAS. For example, for the price of a 5 bay NAS from them, you can do a custom PC build with an older gen CPU, e.g., an Ryzen 5 5600 and a motherboard with 8 SATA ports built in and more storage by buying 8 port SATA PCIE expansion cards, or going with an HBA to use a server disk shelf, along with 32GB DDR4 ECC (even slower clocked kits do not have much of an impact on storage performance as a 10GbE NIC ends up being the bottleneck).
Only annoying issue with the DIY route is currently software like TrueNAS does not make the process of expanding the storage pool easy. Since you can't just stick 1 additional drive in and then assign it to an existing vdev to expand the available storage, thus you end up creating additional vdevs which is a challenge since if you want some more fault tolerance, then you will need to add multiple drives as once. While people do not recommend doing things like a single large vdev with 16 drives in a RAID Z2, if they could make a simple way to expand existing vdevs, then it would make it easy for people to start small, and gradually expand, and not need to rush into additional vdevs.
Aside from that, for accessing a NAS and backing up files remotely, I have found it really convenient to use a VPN server in order to access my home network while on the go, and then simply use the existing backup tools on my devices. For example, on my smartphone, I use the foldersync pro app and after I VPN into the home network, I can either manually start the sync process which backups my user data, or if I want it automated, I can set it to automatically backup while charging.
For my laptop, I have windows backup backup the files to the NAS.
the DYI market is a completely different world.. unraid, truenas are both great mature solutions you can throw on a computer.. but for the majority of the readers here.. it would be a terrible choice..
There are synology, qnap, green storage solutions for just about every price point.. with a ton of features in what is essentially an appliance. you plug it in, put in the drives.. and run through a very simple wizard and the basic features are ready to go. in a couple years when the device is full.. with a synology you "deactivate" a drive.. and pop in a larger drive.. and rebuild the system..
As great as unraid and truenas are.. its not that easy or straight forward.
as someone deep in the tech industry during the day, someone that manages enterprise storage solutions.. when I get home I want to do photography.. i don't want to tinker.. especially with something holding all my images for clients.. i want to know it works.. it'll work when I need it to work.. and if there is a problem I have a solid company to call that can replace whatever is broken. that is absolutely worth a little more money..
Yep, the increased complexity is an issue. From what I have seen for many including myself is the endless waiting for them to release the simpler vdev expansion, which will effectively make truenas almost as simple to use and grow with as a Synology.
Overall, it is the number one issue that I see people encounter, especially when they start with a small setup, e.g., 3-4 8TB drives in a RAID Z1, then some time later, they spot a good deal and buy 1-2 more 8TB drives and they find that they can't just add that storage to their initial vdev, they instead need to create an additional vdev (while there are performance improvements and redundancy improvements with an additional vdev, but many who are new to it get disappointed to find that their purchase of 2 extra 8TB drives, won't be expanding their storage pool by 16TB while allowing for the system to survive a single drive failure.
In terms of overall ease of use, I can't find any open/ free solution that comes anywhere close to Synology in terms of being a simple turn key solution that just automated all of the tedious stuff. Though progress is slowly being made. It is just hard to beat being able to stick in a new drive, then in the UI of the NAS, go to the storage manager, selecting your storage pool, then clicking on the add drive option and selecting the new drive, and the setup wizard will effectively automate everything after clicking next a few times.
While there are more customization that can be done, they have done really well in delivering an "it just works" style user experience if you stick with the defaults.
Well said! i ran a custom NAS solution for years and you are never truly free from having to tinker or tune something.
Being running a pair of ds3617xs systems (previous version of whats being reviewed here) and they are fast and just work.
To get the full performance out of these systems you really need to check all the components one at a time and benchmark after each change... NAS (SW and Network components), switch (managed or unmanaged), LAN (RJ45 oder glassfiber) and the big one is which adaptor to use on the PC/MAC (we had best performance using intel X520/X540 PCI cards using glassfiber connections or the ASUS X100 mini pci card for RJ45 is ok as well and way cheaper).
If you have enough disks look at using RAID6 especially if on one NAS... as we have 2 NAS we run RAID5 and mirror the 2 systems in a DR (desaster recovery) setup with some added unix/linux shell scripts to tie them together.
Don't forget to enable "snapshots" on the filesystems/volumes where your precious data is stored. An absolute lifesaver to be able to restore and older version of the file. We go with every hour from 07:00-19:00 daily for 1 week, 3 weekly and 6 monthly snapshots. Takes up very little space and will save your ass at some point.
Never been a fan of Synology's branded drives. Had good experiences with WD Red/Red Pro drives and usually 1 generation behind the latest and greatest generation of drives. They last approx. 70-80K hours before needing replacing and degrade slowly. The hotswap capability if also great but you need a good cpu to handle the daily load and a disk rebuild at the same time.
All too complicated. I’m really surprised someone hasn’t come up with a simpler system that can be user expandable without being an expert. People need a box that can store a lot and can wirelessly access it relatively quickly with disk redundancy in case of failure. Easy replaceable drives whether disk or SSD . A dummy should be able to operate it and it should appear in an easy to use format on your laptop. Preferably the size of a matchbox but a big box will do for now.
drobo had an amazing product for years.. super simple.. almost no interface.. it just worked.. unfortunately they got bought up by another company that ran them into the ground. every year that goes by keep thinking someone is going to come out with something easier to manage.. and they haven't. Synology isnt terrible but could be a lot better.
Drobo was innovative at the time, but their proprietary and heavy DRM focus of their tech, it lead to data recovery nightmares when an array degraded or a Drobo chassis failed, since you could not simply take the drives out and stick them into another Drobo system. Overall their overly closed nature was their downfall, as it intfered with data recovery efforts in the cases of hardware failures. Though their initial efforts lead to an industry shift of simplifying NAS setup and expansion of storage. Before them, many setups required users to backup their data to a secondary source (some even resorted to tape drives) then expanding the array in ways that effectively destroyed existing data.
simple has a price... that price being you better really really know what todo when your simple system craps out.
The first thing you need todo is calculate how much your content is worth to you and your customers.
Once you know that you can plan your storage infrastructure.
Just remember every disk is a great solution... until it FAILS.
this article opened me up to seeing what new devices are out there..
Asus has released some devices that are both thunderbolt/usb4 and 10gbe networking.. so you can plug in directly when you need to move a lot of files or edit quickly.. or connect via network.
still expensive.. but cheaper than qnaps options.
Asus "lockstor" Gen 3 : they have a 4, 6,8, 10 bay versions.
they seem to get good reviews.
be wary of any PC manufacturer pushing a NAS solution.
Synology is pretty expensive and the low end systems are not all 10Gbe enabled but once configured they just work and serve your data via various protocols 24x7.