Anyone use a NAS for assets drive?

[tricky]

Wondering if anyone uses a NAS as an Assets drive (where texture maps etc are held)? Wondered how capable they are when performing distributed rendering using 10-20 PCs oin the render? I don't have much experience with them - I have an old Intel-based NAS at home but it is very slow indeed.

I guess something like a Synology DS414 would be better, but are they good enough to be hammered by a DR without keeling over?

[AndresAhumada]

Yea.

Try to have these characteristics.

Dual core ..
* 1 gig ram or more
Dual 10 giga ethernet, or dual giga (for both to be full duplex and to work as TEEN)
Internal Connection: SATA III and SSD support.
Try to avoid Qnap are not very reliable.

Cheers ..

[AlexP]

We use a DS414 for all project folders and resources
Had no trouble at all, been pretty impressed actually. We have 20 pcs accessing simultaneously during rendering.
So much better than having an old windows server box sat there just as a file server imo, depends on your needs I guess.

[tricky]

We use a DS414 for all project folders and resources
Had no trouble at all, been pretty impressed actually. We have 20 pcs accessing simultaneously during rendering.
So much better than having an old windows server box sat there just as a file server imo, depends on your needs I guess.

So there are no limits with multiple connections then?

[AlexP]

There is a limit but its 256
If you need more than that, then you'll need to go up a few models

[tricky]

Interesting. Have you got any kind of 'special' switch to handle all the connections and manage prioritisations?

Photoshop files are easily 1GB these days, so if we had a couple of guys opening/saving large files like that, in addition to another couple of guys sending DR jobs for 10 machines to pickup, you reckon the DS414 would cope?

[alexyork]

Interesting. Have you got any kind of 'special' switch to handle all the connections and manage prioritisations?

Photoshop files are easily 1GB these days, so if we had a couple of guys opening/saving large files like that, in addition to another couple of guys sending DR jobs for 10 machines to pickup, you reckon the DS414 would cope?

It might be worth looking into using 2 separate NAS boxes - one for reading/pulling assets off for rendering and one for reading/writing scene files and PSDs etc.

[tricky]

It might be worth looking into using 2 separate NAS boxes - one for reading/pulling assets off for rendering and one for reading/writing scene files and PSDs etc.

Certainly worth considering.

[AlexP]

Well all I can say is that we have never had any trouble. We have a 24 port netgear switch, nothing special. The DS414 can use 2 ports at once, link bonding or whatever.

Worth mentioning that our max files are 300mb upwards, but we generally dont have such large PSDs - up to 500mb generally.

[Morbid Angel]

I donno, I use qnap though its a pro series. I have 16 xeons which can read at once 16 4 GB phoenix cache frames so thats quite a bit of data all on 1gb network and no problems!

[tricky]

Another question on these things:- at the moment, we are using a Windows Server that hosts the domain and it has a number of shares set up so when users log in, they see various drive 'letters' for various things. For example, W:/ is the projects drive and G:/ is the assets drive where all the maps/models etc are stored.

If we were to move over to a Synology NAS, do we create drive letters on the NAS in a similar way, or is it done differently? A typical example would be as follows:-

\\ourserver\assets\textures\wood\woodtexture001.jp g

How do these kinds of UNC addresses work with a NAS?

[AlexP]

You can set up your users and shared folders etc. using the onboard OS on the diskstation.
Very easy to set up, depending how sophisticated you need the security etc to be. We just have basic different shared folders that only certain users have permissions for.
You can then either map drive letters in windows or just navigate directly through the network using UNC paths (this is what we do)
Theres some useful walkthroughs on their support site

[Morbid Angel]

map the drives using script so its the same on all machines. run the script at windows starts as two stage, first remove mapping then add it again, sometimes drive mapping disconnects, so you need to do that.

[leo.surrealismo]

what about backburner manager? where do you install it without affecting renderfarm performance?

[Morbid Angel]

what about backburner manager? where do you install it without affecting renderfarm performance?

bb manager should be running on an actual windows server, or windows workstation, not the NAS. Nas is strictly for storage nothing else.