NAS as texture storage? What is your workflow ?

[Maros]

Hello all,

what is the best solution to storage models/textures for work, what is your workflow ?

Now I have some HDD in my workstation but need more storage and thinking about NAS (like Synology DiskStation DS418).

I have some question:

1) Does it have any impact on speed if I want to use NAS as texture storage comparing to my workstation hdd ?

2) How some studios deal with models and textures ? Probably they have some NAS or some Servers ?

3) If studio buy some texture pack and someone from team need some texture, is it better copy texture to project(if projects are on main C with ssd) or just link it to hdd on server where is it ?

Thanks!
Maros

[Charlie Nicols]

Hi Maros,

In general if you are working in a team having a NAS which you work off is the ideal. You would never have any asset be it proxy,maps,3ds Max file local as this can cause problems in network rendering, work sharing ect.

The problem with NAS is the cost & speed relationship. A nas will almost never be as effective as working off a local SSD however how you balance your NAS technology with the amount of people / network requirement will determine how well it works for you.

If you are a small team of say two people I would just convert a computer to a storage 'server' with a share set up. Then your small team can all work off it's SSD RAIDand then set up internal backup to large HDD RAID and make sure it has a good networking card.

For teams larger you should look at proper NAS like synology as these are easy to setup.

Then for bigger teams or if you want top performance you will want to head towards 10 Gbit networking with a dedicated storage server managed switches ect but this has a high cost.

Overall;
No matter what solution make sure your network is solid or you will have a lot of problem with MAX & network rendering.

SSD storage is what you want to aim for preferably on a dedicated computer if working in a small team

HDD storage - use to backup your SSD storage as it's cheap

Minimum you want is a 1Gb connection to your storage.

Hope this helps =)

[JohnNinos]

Hi Charlie,

I'm facing the same situation, we are a team of two working in the same studio, currently we have a 1Gb Lan that we share folders from both workstations over lan, I have face a lot of problems but the most important is that the last couple of days when i drag and drop a file from one workstation to another I get the screen that says is downloading the file from the network but is extremely slow, it will take like 5mins for a simple model to be merged. I would like to resolve this issue as I don't know what it has been wrong and also find a permanent fast solution for our assets. We have bought a couple of SSDs but there are useless with how lan is set up now. If we get some 10Gb/s network cards for the workstations is there any chance we don't need to buy NAS or set an old WS as  asset storage? Thanks ;)

[Charlie Nicols]

So simply put if I was you if you have two people working you can get great performance with not much cost;

2x workstations with 10Gb cards

1x storage computer wit 10Gbe- Main SSD storage Raid + HDD Raid for backup

On your storage computer hold not just your assets but all max files / projects. Store nothing locally.

Some people may do it differently but in my mind that would be a clean approach. Then if say a user needs to reboot and you are working on a shared project it can stay live as it's on the separate storage computer.   




 

[Njen]

By the way, there is a scenario that is sort of best of both worlds in regards to speed vs convenience using a NAS, and that is to write your own localisation scripts. But this obviously gets a bit technical. I have done this for my own setup, where I have a QNap NAS and three machines. Then when I grab a file from my network drive, a process localises the data to the machine.

The same thing happens when I submit a render through Deadline, where my rendering machines localise the data for the scene, before they begin rendering. There is a smart check to know if a file needs to be updated before copying the data to mimimise the amount of network traffic.

This has saved me a lot of time and hassle, with only a small amount of overhead for initially localising the data. But again, the key here being able to have the ability to build a script/tool to do this.

[JohnNinos]

Hey guys, thank you for the anwers, the option with the third PC and 10Gb network cards seems like an easy and not expensive idea. Thought I would like If there is any a more "compact" solution. So I came up with the following ideas but I would like to be informed if there are going to work or I'll have even more bottlenecks on my network so the only solution is sort of a PC/NAS situation.

1 - If I buy 10Gb network cards and I share a folder from one Workstation to the other is it going to be the same as having my files on a NAS or it will be slower when the Workstation is rendering?
2 - If I set up a kind of software (that I don't know any but I'll find sth) that syncs over LAN and have both Identical SSDs to both of Workstations so everyone drag it's file local and the other one has the same exact paths but everything works locally, something like Johannes Linqvist does via dropbox but in a lan configuration is it going to be faster than NAS and cheaper in sort term?

Thanks