Dual 10G Ethernet ports on mobo but slow internet. Is Dual 10G Ethernet port NAS worth investing in

So I have a Dual 10G Ethernet mobo, but my understanding is that my local service provider does not offer anything fast enough to plug into the 2 10G ports. The mobo also has dual 1G Ethernet ports to connect so i'm not giving up internet. So, I would like to try and utilize the capability of the two ports for NAS. I have seen the Synology DS2015xs 8 port dual 10G port NAS, but not crazy about $1500 price tag.

I would like to set up RAID 0 and use it for rendering, editing, etc. Anyone know of something like this maybe with fewer bays and lower price, but still dual 10G?

System has i7-5820K six core, 32GB RAM, Titan Black. Is a dual 10G port NAS worth the investment for this system or is the six core processor limiting my system to how fast the computer can render video?

Other options or ideas welcome.

You CPU is almost always going to be the limiting factor in video rendering.

I can't see any hard drive based NAS putting out anywhere close to 20 GB. Even if it could, what's your PC going to do with that much speed? The fastest PCIe SSDs I've heard of are in the neighborhood of 1.5 GB/sec (about 12 Gb/sec).

Should still desire to go that route, you'd want a managed switch for your network. That will let you LAG (link aggregation) two or more physical Ethernet interfaces into a single, faster, link. So you'd have two 10G links to the switch (LAGed into a single 20 Gbps link), and the same between your PC and the switch. Your router connects to the switch at whatever speed it supports, probably 100 Mbit or 1 Gbit.

even if you aggregate 2x 10G links, you'll only ever get 10G between two endpoints (if you're going between multiple endpoints then that's where you'll see benefit)

In the real world, most internet links are less than 100Mb/s, so no benefit there.
If your NAS can do 10G, then there's a use for the 10G mobo ports but the only reason in that scenario to use more than 1 of them is resiliency.

mike_d wrote in post #17682917
You CPU is almost always going to be the limiting factor in video rendering.

I can't see any hard drive based NAS putting out anywhere close to 20 GB. Even if it could, what's your PC going to do with that much speed? The fastest PCIe SSDs I've heard of are in the neighborhood of 1.5 GB/sec (about 12 Gb/sec).

Should still desire to go that route, you'd want a managed switch for your network. That will let you LAG (link aggregation) two or more physical Ethernet interfaces into a single, faster, link. So you'd have two 10G links to the switch (LAGed into a single 20 Gbps link), and the same between your PC and the switch. Your router connects to the switch at whatever speed it supports, probably 100 Mbit or 1 Gbit.

aggregating links does not get you a faster link speed! it only gets you more pipe for separate sessions...

Point to Point transfers between two systems by using multiple 10G ports can be used to increase data transfers, but it is a very poorly supported concept, and you're unlikely to do more than give yourself a headache at this point in time trying to configure such a setup. If you're building a super computer with custom software, then you might make more headway in that realm.

However in the "real world" Dual 10G ports are far more useful when you're dealing with multiple clients hitting the same server. Something like a media storage server, or batch processing server, where multiple people on different computers are pulling/pushing to from their own work station kind of thing.

Also keep in mind what networking gear you have and how things are configured. Obviously 10G gear plugged into common consumer level networking gear will drop your expensive 10G stuff back down to normal transfer speeds anyway.

Some dual port 10G NAS boxes will also allow you to do something like connecting one of its ports into a standard speed network, and then use the other port to connect the NAS directly to a 10G port on one computer. Data between the NAS and that computer gets processed over the 10G line, but other systems on the network will be able to access data at 'normal' speeds.

In my experience playing around with 10G gear usually involves a bit of frustrated googling and pouring through documentation, because 'something' will refuse to work properly out of the box, and you end up doing a lot of trouble shooting to track down what is actually causing slower than expected speeds. (Ironic side effect of how robust networking systems are. They won't simply 'fail' and always throw up big and obvious signs of what is wrong, but frequently cause a 'cascade failure', where something isn't working right in one spot, so the next piece of gear drops down in speed as well. Everything just "keeps working" even if it isn't able to work at its best.)


If you want to get into higher speed networks, then do be prepared to either pay to have a networking expert come in to provide advise (and/or set everything up for you) or to do a lot of reading and studying on your own. It isn't hard, but it is fairly complex and has tons of gotchas and issues that can popup.


Sitting down and asking yourself what you really want out of your gear is probably a good place to start. Don't think about what gear you want, but rather focus on what do you want to Do?

OP, FYI, that NAS you mentioned supports 10G with SFP+ ports - that is Small Form factor Pluggable port. In plain English, you need to buy 2 transceiver for 10G. So you'll need to spend a few hundred dollars more for each transceiver. So in total, perhaps $2K for the full 10G solution.

10G for the consumer is not quite there yet. The data centers and large enterprise systems will be populated first, then trickle down to the consumer in couple of years.

If you want speed, how about getting an SSD drive. Those will be faster than any NAS, dual 10G equipped or not.

I've asked myself what I want to do. I've been doing photography for awhile and would now like to move into video as well. I've got Adobe CC and enjoy learning Premiere, After Effects, etc, but I don't like how long it takes to render. So I have been trying to figure out what makes the process faster and, so far, the number of cores seems to be the only way to speed things up. I don't have the funds for dual xeon 12-18 core processors. I would like to, but I went with the i7-5820 for now even the i7-5960 was out of reach.

I also like shooting time lapse and would like After Effects to play faster when trying to preview and edit time lapse. Multiple drives in RAID 0 was also something of interest, but so far has not made much of a difference, but my raid card was a cheap one and the new mobo offers possibilities for multiple ssd drives in raid 0 and hopefully two or three intel 750 400s or 1.2s.

I'm no expert with computers. I know enough to slap em together. I've always wanted a very fast computer and by most standards, I feel I have one, but not by the video editing standards and especially with a future that would include 4k.

I guess that I was looking at a NAS as more of a DAS for the one system. When I saw the Synology NAS, with it advertising 20Gbps transfer rate (dual 10GbE, I thought that it could work as a RAID 0 DAS with the dual 10Gbps Ethernet connections on the mobo working as bi-directional transfer speed of 20Gbps. This does not seem to be the case so I will have to wait for ATT to catch up for me to enjoy super fast internet.

building it, to me, is as much fun as using it, but a little frustrating when I put the time and money into it only to find out I still don't have enough to speed things up the way I would like to.

On the SSDs, I have 4 that I set up in RAID 0, but with a cheap card. With the new mobo, it has sata express and I was trying to figure out how the cabling works to set up 3 to 4 drives in RAID 0. The mobo says RAID is available for sata ports 0-5, but a little confused on how to configure. Would it be faster to set up RAID 0 with the sata express or 4 sata III ports or connected to the M.2 port? I know the Intel 750 series requires M.2 with the PCIe drive, but I'm confused on how multiple 750 series drives work if there is only one M.2 on the board.

Just another thought. It probably best to stay "within the box". 10G Etherent sounds all well and good, but it is a general interface which will work with all things networking/internetwor​king, but ... it has a lot overhead which makes it a bit inefficient. The internal SATA interfaces are designed FOR disk drives from the get-go. So if you can stay "inside" that that would be best, and a lot cheaper too.

Also, consider a fast graphics card for video processing. This will probably have this biggest performance gain than all the above; but I know next to nothing in this area, so someone else will have to chime in.

Another thing that is also good to do is to watch your system performance while actually doing work. Look at what resources are being consistently capped out and forcing other things to wait. Sadly dealing with video encoding is simply a complex process that takes a lot of computing power in general and deals with a ton of data in various stages.

Whenever possible keep your data storage in system unless you have a good reason to move it else where. Network storage outside of the core system is good if you have lots of people accessing that to work with it, or if you are using it as a backup to what is hosted on the local system, but it is rarely going to be an ideal solution for a single person to work with something themselves.

Keeping high speed SSD drives on the main computer for your 'working data', and then moving it to bulk storage spinning disks when you are "done" with the processing, can be a good and cost effective workflow.

RAID impact on data flow depends on the implementation and data access style. RAID 0 has a few different flavours and depends on the controller and configuration. Some versions split data in an A/B read and write process so that writing or pulling any given file involves both drives because the controller evenly splits the file data across both drives, while others take a lazier approach and write a given file to one drive or the other.

You may actually be better off with just standard SATA connections to individual drives. This lets you configure things so the system pulls different resources from different locations, and you don't have any worry about what the RAID controller is or isn't doing with regards to actual speed.


If you are considering a graphics card upgrade, then you may want to go look up the supported card list from Adobe. They have been adding better support for general consumer cards lately, and the focus is mostly on the CUDA/Stream Processing cores, so you don't need to feel overly tempted to drop the money on the pro grade workstation cards. (They are 'better' in some ways, but the price jump is a little much for what they offer you in my mind.)

You seem to have money to throw away, and you're throwing it in the wrong direction. A single, fast SSD is sufficient for 99% of tasks. RAID 0 is a great way to lower the reliability of your system. I really hope you have good backups, especially of your operating system disk. Test the restore to a single disk you keep spare.

Before you go throwing more money away spend some time to work out where your bottleneck is. I'm pretty sure you're it for editing, and for rendering it's CPU not disk.

Heya,

I think you're going way too far into network solutions when you're real problem is actually that you're trying to increase overall performance for rendering video.

While rendering is a very CPU intensive task where more cores and higher clock rates are to your advantage, but there is a lot of advancement in GPU encoding too. I'm not into heavy duty video editing, mine is minor, but even my minor use I use my GPU for common encoding tasks and things optimized for that (like CUDA) are much faster than equivalent CPU tasks. It may be worth looking into what you're doing, to see if the software you're running would benefit better a performance GPU rather than over the top CPU stuff. That may not be the case in 4K and up, but it's worth looking into for now if budget is a concern.

As for RAID 0 and video editing, I would absolutely avoid that. Especially on a cheap/generic controller card or motherboard controller. The last thing you want to do is rendering a big file and then your array fall apart, or a drive trip up and you lose the data. RAID 0 is really dead these days with the advent of large capacity SSD. I would suggest you spend the money on a SSD instead. You can get nice 1TB SSD's for $300~400 these days. This is a way better solution to using RAID 0 on HDD's.

On that note, you're way better off with filling your case with SSD's/HDD's rather than trying to work from a NAS solution. The NAS should be where you dump work after it's done for archive or to change projects. I would not suggest you work from it where you're pulling data over a NAS (limited to the speed of the HDD in the NAS, which is the slowest point, doesn't matter what the LAN speed is capable of if you're just using old slow hard drives here). Instead, throw a 4TB HDD in your case, and a 1TB SSD in there to work from. Way better use of the money to get speed so that the bottle neck isn't your network solution.

Summary:

Research GPU rendering if it's applicable for what you're doing
Utilize high capacity SSD over RAID 0 HDD's.
Drop the network solution for movement of data while working on said data.

Very best,

What is your primary reason for external 2x10G drives? Performance alone, or do you plan to move this external storage around?

If it is for performance alone, you should consider SSDs or SSDs in RAID0. You can also consider PCI-e based flash storage. Actual/practical performances you can achieve in that set up is WAY higher than anything you can cook up with 10G ethernet. And that set up would be a lot cheaper and simpler as well.

I guess I did not give enough information on this. I have SSDs and HDDs. My boot drive is a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB and when I render short videos on this drive (transferred from HDD) I am very happy with the rendering speed. I have 4 more SSDs that I have accumulated 128GB x3 and 256GB x2 that are drives that were used for laptops and a previous RAID 0 set up I had on my older system. Along with these I have several 1 and 2TB drives that were given to me because they were replaced by larger drives at my day job.

I do understand that SSDs are the way to go and I hope to purchase one or two, Intel 750 series PCIe drives in the near future. These are supposed to be the fastest drives on the market today and the 400GB drives are more in my price range.

I don't have money to through away, quite the opposite. That is why I am asking before I make my next move. The board was purchased with as much ability to upgrade as possible. I spent months looking at boards to see what offered what and what options where available if I wanted to upgrade.

I got the impression, from research, that rendering, storing and backing up 4k video would require large SSDs, RAID 0 with no less than 6 drives in order to obtain the necessary speed to edit and view 4k, 5k and 8k video as well as tape drives to backup.

This board also has 12 sata iii ports for backup drives as well. I had no intention of running RAID 0 with HDDs. I know that the SSDs are faster and more reliable. My intention is to run SSDs in RAID 0 only for editing and rendering and having large HDDs only as backup and storage.

The thought on this board already equipped with dual 10GBE ports and dual 1GBE ports was the hope that the cables being laid near my home will offer fiber optics and that the internet might be much faster in the future. Until that day I thought that these ports could be used for something else that could provide super speed, but it sounds like it might be more for super network speed only.

zerovision wrote in post #17689745
I guess I did not give enough information on this. I have SSDs and HDDs. My boot drive is a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB and when I render short videos on this drive (transferred from HDD) I am very happy with the rendering speed. I have 4 more SSDs that I have accumulated 128GB x3 and 256GB x2 that are drives that were used for laptops and a previous RAID 0 set up I had on my older system. Along with these I have several 1 and 2TB drives that were given to me because they were replaced by larger drives at my day job.

I do understand that SSDs are the way to go and I hope to purchase one or two, Intel 750 series PCIe drives in the near future. These are supposed to be the fastest drives on the market today and the 400GB drives are more in my price range.

I don't have money to through away, quite the opposite. That is why I am asking before I make my next move. The board was purchased with as much ability to upgrade as possible. I spent months looking at boards to see what offered what and what options where available if I wanted to upgrade.

I got the impression, from research, that rendering, storing and backing up 4k video would require large SSDs, RAID 0 with no less than 6 drives in order to obtain the necessary speed to edit and view 4k, 5k and 8k video as well as tape drives to backup.

This board also has 12 sata iii ports for backup drives as well. I had no intention of running RAID 0 with HDDs. I know that the SSDs are faster and more reliable. My intention is to run SSDs in RAID 0 only for editing and rendering and having large HDDs only as backup and storage.

The thought on this board already equipped with dual 10GBE ports and dual 1GBE ports was the hope that the cables being laid near my home will offer fiber optics and that the internet might be much faster in the future. Until that day I thought that these ports could be used for something else that could provide super speed, but it sounds like it might be more for super network speed only.

That makes a bit more sense. Rather than taking advice from the Internet I suggest you try it and see - render some 4K video and see what happens. If the CPU is at or near 100% (or at least one or more of the cores are) then the IO subsystem is sufficient. If the CPU isn't being fully used and the IO devices are reporting being near 100% usage then they could be too slow.

My guess is your CPU will be the limiting factor, it always is for me. You may be able to offload some of this to a fast GPU. I don't think you need PCI-e SSDs, a regular SATA SSD (anything modern like the Samsung 850 pro) is likely to be just fine.