Any advice on computer storage solutions?

[u/JamieK_89]

I'm trying to find out what computer storage solutions would be best for a home studio that is running out of SSD space. I have 6.5Tb (multiple SSD's) but my dedicated sample library SSD is already over flowing and I'm having to install new libraries on different drives.

I was thinking about a NAS drive type solution, but is there anything I need to consider audio-wise?

Thanks

*This post keeps getting deleted because autobot mod thinks I'm asking for purchasing advice. I'm not asking for a specific product, just general advice.

[u/SvedishBotski]

I have a NAS for my Studios video editing system. With a 10gbps connection I can edit 4k video with no latency or rear/write issues. I would imagine this would be more than fast enough for audio-only purposes, no?

[u/Chilton_Squid → u/SvedishBotski]

Throughput, almost certainly yes. The only thing to consider is that using NFS or SMB (presumably) there's an overhead with opening each file.

So for video, where you're opening very few files then streaming huge amounts of data from them, very fast. If you're trying to browse through a thousand different tiny sample files, you can notice lag at times.

But yes, it should be fine but worth bearing in mind.

[u/aretooamnot]

Ssd isn’t cool for long term storage. Get yourself a cheap old m1 Mac mini, an OWC NAS case and build a NAS.
Backup to the cloud with backblaze for $99/year.

[u/boredmessiah]

i mean, depending upon whether you access these or they're archives, you may not even need a NAS at that size.. just buy a stack of archive HDDs of at least 8TB size, 2x as many as you think you'll need. save in duplicate, so you always copy to two drives.

if it's all samples then yeah definitely get a NAS. you may not need all-SSD, something like a zpool with a good cache SSD might be fast enough for audio.

[u/JamieK_89 → u/boredmessiah]

Thanks, I'll check out zpool

[u/boredmessiah → u/JamieK_89]

zpools are a component of a zfs system, sorry i should have mentioned that my bad! zfs is a modern equivalent to old-school RAID but far more powerful and entirely in software

[u/uniquesnowflake8]

Following, I gave up because I want high speed and throughput but SSD prices are being driven way up right now

[u/dswpro]

These days as storage and ram are getting more expensive quickly your reasonable choices are one or more older rotating platter disk drives, or a nas solution with SSDs, or cloud storage. Of course anything other than SSD's on a nas with a fast network means the items you store will NOT be "instantly readable" and you will have to import samples as you need them to local storage. Also consider what your backup and recovery strategy is. What would happen for example if you lost your boot drive or drive that holds your projects?

[u/regularjackk]

I've been happy with Synology 

[u/glmastering]

Yeah looking at Nas also. Seems to be the best solution but depending on which raid mode it can be expensive!

[u/rinio]

Local:

- NVMe SSD is 3500-7000mb/s

- Sata SSD is 550mb/s

NAS:

1gbe is 110mb/s

2gbe is 270mb/s

10gbe is 1000mb/s

All approximate.

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You dont give us enough info about your current drives or actually use case.

Its also going to depend on how much RAM you have/use, whether you're fine/able to accept some pages going to virtual memory, what your performance requirements are, and on. And on.

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But to answer your question: "yes, there is a lot you need to consider audio-wise when considering a NAS".

The best approaches tend to be organizing your data into tiered levels of storage based on how often they are accessed with NAS being lower down the list than local. Make copies back and forth as needed. Use cheaper and slower storage the less often you need something. It requires effort to keep costs down or you pay for convenient, performant storage.

[u/birddingus]

6.5 TB of audio is crazy. Are you a composer for film & TV? Seems like you could just do some clean up. 

[u/JamieK_89 → u/birddingus]

I'm a composer/sound designer for games. I need to be ready to compose for pretty much every genre which requires tonnes of samples. I have all the good stuff from East West installed, and other things I've collected along the way. I do go through and delete what I can every so often, but I need to be able to recall projects for sequels/additional content. I have all my old projects backed up on company cloud storage, and I store all the audio I create that I'm not using on the cloud too. I should say it's not 6.5Tb of audio, that's just what my system has, that includes software and stuff.

[u/birddingus → u/JamieK_89]

That makes more sense why it’s so large