Which NAS in an OSX environment with many small files (3D) and video/audio

[ypar]

Hello all,

I use a self-built NAS with Ubuntu and SMB. I have a 4x500GB setup with a RAID 0+1, ie mirrored and striped 1TB.

I used to have a PC/OSX mixed environment but it's 95% OSX now. (the occasional PC/Linux use pops up)

With the upgrade to Lion the Samba has become painfully slow. So I am taking the opportunity to think about an overhaul of my setup.

I use the NAS as my active project file repository. It is physically located in another part of the place I am working and connected to my/our workstations with Gbit LAN.

I do have a lot of 3D work and compositing work. This means many small files (eg Image01322.psd with approx 1-16 MB each) in many directories. Mixed between those are movie files of anything between 100 to 1000 MB that I need as intermediates. Then there are thousands of small audio/image files .mp3 and jpgs.

As mentioned above 90-95% percent of the work is done on OSX, although occasionally the odd PC is in use. At this point in time there are only 1-2 users, but that might change quickly.

So, these are my questions:

1. Is there a good off-the-shelf solution for my needs?
2. What kind of DIY NAS might work well for me?
3. How can I optimize network performance (which I guess is crucial) in a OSX environment, if one of above points are met? tools, software, recomm.

Maybe there are solutions that I haven't thought of at all, like keeping the disks close to the MacPro workstation(s) - using a Mac Mini as server etc etc

Thanks for any inputs!
best
yp

 

[stevech]

I suggest reading the user posting on this topic in the user forums on Synology and QNAP. Both have Time Machine and iTunes and Apple media streaming support, and you can read and/or inquire about users' experiences.

 

[ypar]

Thanks for your reply.

I went over there and looked at the forums, it was pretty frightening - many people seem to have problems with AFP shares.

So I will look at rebuilding my own NAS with the latest Ubuntu and newest netatalk 2.2.1 which doesn't seem to have problems with Lion.

I don't really need Time Machine/iTunes for my network, so I could also go with NFS. Are there any thoughts about AFP vs NFS?