Q: Using a NAS for media storage?
A friend of mine is using her 2011 27" iMac for video editing with Final Cut Pro X. For the last two years, she always kept her iMac's hard drive nearly empty and stored the movie files on a few sets of two USB 2.0 hard drives - those sets of two were each turned in to a RAID 1 via Disk Utility. She then copied the data she was working with to her iMac's internal disk and put them back onto the USB drives after finishing the project.
However, she wasn't satisfied with that - and aas the RAID volumes kept restoring after a reboot of the computer and the transfer rates of the RAID volumes over USB 2.0 weren't too great altogether, she finally got a QNAP TS-421 4-bay NAS.
I did now set up the QNAP drive to cluster its four 2TB hard drives into a 5,9 TB RAID5 volume and mounted it on the iMac via SMB. When I then tried to create an event on the volume, I saw that Final Cut doesn't show it in the list of available drives, and when I googled for possible solutions, I found that Final Cut does not show network drives as an event or project location at all.
I have to say that I'm astonished that an Apple Pro application does not allow you to use your network shares as storage, but for now, I'll have to live with that and find a way around it.
A possible solution that many websites suggest is creating a disk image on the network drive and then mount it on the Mac. Final Cut will then recognize it as a storage volume. However, I wonder how this will affect the disk's performance. Do you have any tips regarding this concern?
For another approach, the TS-421 NAS supports AFP and iSCSI in addition to SMB. Would the use of either of these allow me to use the volume in Final Cut without using an extra disk image file?
Thank you in advance!
iYassin
Posted on Sep 18, 2013 3:44 PM