TO NAS, or not, TO NAS

[Alexander Herring]

I'm setting up my digital eq work flow(chain).

Been reading the DAM book.

Peter Krogh says that he doesn't personally recommend using NAS as primary storage

as of the writing of the last version of the DAM book....2009.

I bought a Synology 1813+ to handle all the digital files in my life 8tb total.

I want to put my photo library on there and run lightroom and photoshop.

I will keep the lightroom catalog on the local drive...my smoking fast macbook pro SSD.

Used to use the 1st gen intel tower but the laptop just blew its doors off.

Is this safe?

or should I use a NON-NAS primary external?

Ultimatley, one of the following two set-ups were what I had in mind...

NAS>local back up & glacier

OR

External NON-NAS > NAS > glacier

Thank you for any advice and opinions,

Alex

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

I don't have my copy of his book to hand - does he give a specific reason?

[Alexander Herring]

From what I've gathered so far as of the book last publish...he says he simply doesn't recommend it.

I'm curiuos if in the last 4 years things have become more stable on that front.

Do you use a NAS for your primary?

[Jim Wilde]

Others may not agree with me, but my view is that the primary purpose of a NAS is to enable sharing of data across a Local network. So if there's no requirement for that level of sharing of original image files, what's the point of putting them on a slower (and possibly less reliable) medium?

I keep all my image files on internal drives, but even if I couldn't do that I'd use fast external drives (eSata or USB3). I do use a NAS, but it's only used as one of my several external backup devices, plus some file sharing between the family members.

[Alexander Herring]

This synology with gigabit access is smoking fast with Lightroom managing 140,000 images.

My concern is whether or not the risk of corruption increases when working on a NAS.

I might move to a primary non-NAS solution and keep the NAS for back up only.

Still researching...

Thanks for the responce.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Yes, my primary's a Synology NAS as, like you, I'm primarily MacBook Pro based.

I emailed Peter to check his current thoughts on the matter, and forwarded the reply he'd sent to you, confirming that he's more comfortable with images stored on NAS now as long as it's a good quality like Synology.

[Alexander Herring]

Funny enough, i was just about to post that he had supposrted the idea of the Synology!

The other thing he also mentioned was that he prefered to have it local so that he could run data verification in the background.

I'm looking into whether there is a way to do that on the synology.

Will report back my findings...

[ColdForest]

I would think the primary reason not to use NAS for primary storage would be *speed*. I'm not a Mac user so can't comment on what the latest interconnects are for these systems, but most (modern) internal HDD interconnects are much faster than the gigabit interconnects used to transfer data between the host and the NAS device(s) (even the Synology, which tries to optimize the 1GB LAN ports by using link aggregation). SATA 3 can handle up to 6GB/s so it's native link speed is a factor of 2.5 or 4 faster than the NAS.

Of course there are plenty of other factors that contribute to speed/performance so this isn't the only consideration, but the general question regarding why Peter briefly mentions not recommending this (I see the reference is my copy as well) likely relates to speed. In the end the speed question is also partly related to how Lightroom manages disk i/o. I've not really noticed LR being very disk bound (mostly memory and CPU bound from what I can tell), so perhaps the disk i/o performance isn't all that relevant to LR...

I briefly just looked at Apple's Thunderbolt technology (which is apparently available on the Mac Pros) and this seems like a much higher performing interconnect for external peripherals (including NAS devices like the Synology). Obviously, technologies/devices like this render the local vs. remote interconnect performance differences moot .

[Alexander Herring]

Speed has been incredible with the synology.

Library on local macbook pro(SSD)...photos on synology....RAID 5

smoking fast...

Peter explained that his main reason for not prefering the NAS was that he could not do file verification in the background.

I'm a bit fogy on the subject and I'm still learning and setting up a full safety system in my studio, but it would seem that having Cronosync

copy the data from the synology to another secondary back up would implement verification of the data...perhaps there is something about it being in a network "state" that is not as secure, or verifiable...I'm sure Peter or others could explain it further.  Still learning, still learning.

New technology...constantly learning:)

I learned a few thing from your post...thanks for sharing.   And thank goodness everything has, for the most part, become functionally fast.

Now, just need to get the system in place to keep it as safe as possible.

[ColdForest]

Ya, that is one impressive box to be sure! Too expensive for my home needs, but I've been wanting to get a Synology DS411slim ever since Linux Torvalds solicited feedback on G+ for his home backup needs (https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/REfnCV1y8Dy and https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/hvnMn1fFKEm) .

[kathyand]

I just purchased a Synology and I wanted to know what you discovered about using the Synology with Lightroom and what you learned about file verification with the Synology. Any information will help. Thanks.

[FilleRoelants]

i just bought one as well and I am having the same questions, but I don't seem to find answers anywhere.. any updates?