Skylake / Thunderbird 3 (USB C port) NAS and video edit server

[3DHack]

Hi folks,

For video production I need new workstation and server for backup and editing for 4K production and, after a bit of Googling, I've become aware of the arrival of TB3 with the new Skylake motherboards that are coming out this month (Aug 2015).

Apart from the recently anounced QNAP with TB2 I'm wondering when we'll see TB3 NAS products and if there is any advice regarding a DIY build?

As for server software I've had years of reliable success with Freenas (up to 7x). After the fork at V8 I found OpenMediaVault tricky to install, while Freenas8 lacked easy to use scheduled backups, so I've been sitting happily at 7.2 for the last few years but feel I may need to step up to take advantage of some of the newer transfer upgrades I've heard of with more recent windows OS improvements(or am I wrong?).

Any suggestions welcome for my video workstation / server NAS / DAS including connectivity options ie Thunderbird 3 or fibre or 10GIG ethernet or anything else for that matter.

Thanks

Nigel

 

[azazel1024]

Probably awhile. Even with 4k video production needs, do you really need a thunderbolt enclosure? If this is straight up DIY and you want the best performance, building a Skylake based server with the disks internal is probably the way to go. You can run an eSATA enclosure for better performance than USB3 or if you need absolute maximum performance, you are probably better off with a front externally accessible drive enclosure if you need the drives to be somewhat portable (there are some where the entire enclosure is easily removable, not simply the individual drives).

If you need maximum performance, do not use FreeNAS, use Windows. You get SMB Multichannel with that to any other Windows 8+ OS. So it is easy and cheap to do something like getting a couple of quad port Intel NICs and connecting it up to the workstation(s) and then you have 4Gbps of bandwidth between them. A lot cheaper than a 10GbE NIC. Of course if you need >4Gbps of bandwidth, you'd probably want to look at 10GbE NICs anyway. Then again, if your requirements are 4Gbps or less of bandwidth, you don't need the expense of TB or any flavor (which likely would add $200-400 to any enclosure). A plain USB3 enclosure has the bit rate to hit 4Gbps after encoding overhead.

Depending on what you want the server to do, I'd personally look at a Core i3 Haswell based server, 8 or 16GB of RAM, USB3 enclosure, quad port Intel GbE NIC and Windows 8.1 and call it a day. Ignoring drive cost, you are looking at maybe $1000 full up for the server including the Windows license and possibly $100 or $200 less than that. Before drive costs of course. 3 drive RAID0 array or a 4 drive RAID5 array in the machine and in the USB3 enclosure could of course increase costs by $350-$2000+ depending on drive selection (IE do you need a 3-pack of 2TB drives in each, or do you need a 4-pack of 6TB drives in each).

For the workstation I would look at Skylake with an i7-6700k in it for maximum performance. That or consider a Haswell-E based workstation. The entry level Hasy-E is hexacore and would likely cost roughly the same as going Skylake, but with better multithread performance, though not as good single thread performance. Otherwise I'd look at similar in the workstation, other than skip the enclosure and I'd consider, depending on likely video file size, something like a 512GB or 1TB SSD as the drive in the workstation as well as at least 16GB and maybe 32 or 64GB of RAM. Haven't done much 4k video work myself (by much I mean any, only 720p and 1080p).

 

[sfx2000]

Any suggestions welcome for my video workstation / server NAS / DAS including connectivity options ie Thunderbird 3 or fibre or 10GIG ethernet or anything else for that matter.

If you're a single Workstation - a large directly attached TB large array is probably the fastest way to go, and then you can use 10GiGE to near-term/archival storage on a NAS/DAS box.

Much depends on your production workflow.

 

[sfx2000]

And for what it's worth - one of the items that Skylake brings to the table is Intel Gen9 Graphics - which includes full HEVC (and this implies H265) decode and encode - most GPU's in 3Q-2015 might support decode, so Intel's Gen9 is one of the first...

This can have a significant positive impact on 4K workflow...

 

[azazel1024]

My only comment on the encode is, if it is similar to the h.264 encode in earlier models of Intel hardware, then it is likely extremely fast, extremely power efficient and not as high quality as x86 encode. It still makes some short cuts and less ideal motion estimation decisions than x86.

Doing a fair number of quicksync vs pure x86 encode with Handbrake, which as far as I have heard is the highest quality QSV encoding (a lot of other products are hack jobs really), the speed up can easily be 3-4x over pure x86, but doing frame by frame comparisons, the QSV encoded stuff is somewhat lower quality in high motion scenes. Mostly it is stuff you wouldn't notice a lot of unless you have very exacting standards and very sharp eyes.

The other downside is that in my experience QSV results in 10-20% larger final transcoded videos than using x86 encode with exacting standards (and still a slightly lower quality final product). If you do not have exacting standards, then QSV is great (especially if slightly larger files don't worry you). It is awesome for things like transcoding video on the fly for streaming.

 

[sfx2000]

Agree - QSV for H264 is great for on-the-fly transcodes, and it's also very useful is a production environment during the edit process - being able to preview on the fly is an incredible timesaver - and if what we're being promised with Skylake is similar, this will be a big productivity enhancement for those working with HEVC and 4K...

And in the field, having Skylake in a laptop can be a huge win for viewing captures...

For production renders, at present, it's better to go with a known solution on cores (or a dedicated processor card).

 

[3DHack]

Hey folks,
It's been a year and I've been fumbling along with a very makeshift strategy for my 4K video storage.

I got a couple of Samsung 950Pro 500GB U2 NVMe drives on my motherboard for fast delivery of 4K edit files and two 8TB Seagate Archive disks for storage and archive but they've recently started playing up, showing up as foreign and prompting me to 'import' them, which I'm loath to do because my IT guys reckon there's a chance of data loss.

Plus my trusty freeNAS machine (HP microserver) began faltering, so I'm in a pickle with most of my precious data stuck on two disks I'm scared to 'import' again. I'm waiting on a USB3.0 external drive caddy which I hope may be a workaround for the foreign issue (hoping that was simply because the drives were attached internally via SATA )

So I started looking at Thunderbolt 3 DAS options to see if any had entered the market and found these

http://thedigitallifestyle.com/w/index.php/2016/10/03/expanding-pcs-with-thunderbolt-3-storage/

They look like what I was hoping to find a year ago and to my surprise include Thunderbolt 3 network sharing options at a fraction of the cost of 10GbE.

Any suggestions?

How come when I search SmallNetBuilder, the home of NAS and Networking, I don't find anyone talking about this apparent revolution?

Best wishes
Nigel (aka 3DHack)