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  • Loading / saving / rendering scene with textures stored on NAS slow

    Hi everyone,
    This is not necessarily a V-ray problem, rather 3ds max or a problem in the communication between my computer and the NAS, but I know many of you here are very knowledgeable and I would very much appreciate your help:

    I have recently purchased a NAS (Synology 220+, 2 drives, Raid 1), that I intend to use as a file server where I would store all my max scenes, assets and textures to be accessed on my local machine but also remotely.

    The problem that have arisen is that opening and saving a 3ds max scene takes 5-10x as long as it would from the local disk, and starting a render takes somewhere between 2-3 times as long as from local. I have 1 gbit network and can transfer files to the NAS at a rate of 120 mb/s (1 gbit) without any issue. When starting max there are a few seconds initially when the computer pulls the scene from the NAS at a high speed, but then it decreases into almost no speed at all, it remains this way for many minutes until the scene is ready. Same thing when saving. When starting up a render, the transfer speed over network never seems to reach that high at all.

    After countless hours of troubleshooting I have concluded that the problem is the textures. If I delete all paths, save the file and restart it, it starts very quick. Same thing if I override all materials and render, instantaneous. However the entire purpose of having the NAS is to have everything stored and accessible from there.

    I have made exceptions in windows defender for the shared folder on the NAS, and for every directory related to the 3ds max install, and I am admin on my computer (win 10).

    At this point I don't know what else I can do, so any help would be greatly appreciated!

    Best / Olof

  • #2
    Hi Olof, so quick question. Are you using a mapped driver or a UNC path? Though the NAS should not be this slow, it might be some issue with unc path if you are using it, hard to say but it could be that you should try a drive letter instead. Similarly, if you are using a driver letter, try unc and see if that works any better. What kind of drives do you have in your NAS?

    Just so you know not all raids are equal, some can be slower. Have a look here: https://www.diffen.com/difference/RAID_0_vs_RAID_1

    I am also using synology on raid 5 and its pretty fast. The thing about your speed measurement is that not all files can be read or written at the max network speed. Raids have issue with a lot of smaller files, you can see this if for example you try to copy one 1 Gb file or 1000 1Mb files to your NAS, in the second test you might get just a few megabytes per second and overall the copy process will be much slower. For 3ds max in particular, it writes the file slowly, and large file will be even slower to write to NAS then to disk because disk and machine RAM communicate at a rate of a few hundred MB/s If you have a fast SSD hard drive, it will be much quicker then the NAS drive. With that said, I would recommend having SSD drives in the NAS too it will help the performance, but unfortunately the 2 drive raid 1 is probably going to be just too slow. When working from raid 5 for example, I have 12 6 TB drives, so reading the data is between multiple drives at once. On top of that I have bridged the LAN ports so I used all 6 ports to get maximum of about 800 Mb/S data rate. However this is unnoticeable when just 1-2 workstations reads the files, it will be more noticeable when 10-20 machines access the server.
    Dmitry Vinnik
    Silhouette Images Inc.
    ShowReel:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxSJlvSwAhA
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitry-v...-identity-name

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    • #3
      Hello, and thank you for your reply!
      I am using a drive letter, that was one of the purposes, to be able to keep all paths from existing 3ds max scenes.

      When it comes to random read / writes I understand that NAS in many cases is slower than local disk. However, when I benchmark the NAS from my workstation with Crystaldisk / diskmark, it actually scores higher in random read/writes of small files than my local disk! So in my opinion that shows that the problem isn't related to the disks in the NAS or to the network, rather it is some other problem. Of course, I was not expecting as quick file operations as from local disk, but currently it takes 20 x longer to open / save / render etc, which i hardly think is normal.

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      • #4
        Hi Guys, was there any resolution to this matter? Was are having the same problem with 2024 and corona 10? Any help please!

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