Question Video editing off Drobo 5c

[nickbeef]

I work as a freelance video producer. In addition to my SSD boot drive, I've got a 4tb HDD internal drive for current projects, and then various external drives for archived projects. I've been mostly working with 1080p highly compressed footage, so I haven't had to buy more then one new external drive a year for archive. However, I've started working more with 4K footage, and 4K RAW footage, and so I'm not only concerned about how to archive this, but also how to edit with the larger files. I'm currently looking into getting a Drobo, and slowly adding drives, both for capacity and redundancy.

Will the Drobo 5c work well in this configuration, both as an archive drive, but also possibly to edit off of. As an archive the 5c seems like a no-brainier, it's cheaper then the other 5 bay Drobos. But is USB C (USB 3) going to be acceptable for editing 4K footage off of? Is the whole RAID/redundancy going to slow things down enough that I shouldn't even bother editing off of it? Should I consider other Drobo 5 bays, even though they cost a whole heck of a lot more?

 

[USAFRet]

Early on, I really really wanted to like Drobo's.
But there were far too many issues with data loss, etc.
They may have gotten better.

But considering current NAS boxes from other suppliers like Synology or Qnap, I see little reason to go with a Drobo and its proprietary semi RAID thing.

Editing from a Drobo or other NAS box? Well, ideally, you'd use that for just a target drive for archives once you were done editing on your PC.
I wouldn't use it as the "main" storage/work drive. No matter how you connect it...USB or ethernet...it will be slower than on internal drive, especially an SSD.

 

[nickbeef]

Thanks. Editing off a fast internal HDD is fine. I have spare SSD's lying around, but obviously they have much small storage capacity's, so constantly moving projects around is both a hassle and maybe bad for the drive (many writes & re-wrights)? I don't know.

But, yeah, I'm not an expert on NAS, but what I seem to like about Drobo is that I can just dump in various drives of any size, and it seems to automatically formate them, and can re-create drives in case of a failure. This all sounds super convenient. I'm not sure if other drives offer that. Not sure that I can get a 5 bay NAS for $350 or so, like Drobo. Not sure. I always have trusted Western Digital products, so I'm not whether theres a good option there as well?

 

[nickbeef]

what would you recommended that is easy to use and in the same price range?

 

[USAFRet]

Yes, the Drobo sounds convenient. That's what attracted it to me in the first place.
But on later investigation...not so much.

I have a 4 bay Qnap TS-453a, with 4x 4TB drives in it, RAID 5. It has performed flawlessly for over 2 years, 24/7.
It is my main media storage box, and holds nightly backups of all the house systems.

I've used it to stream out 1080p video to 3 or 4 devices at the same time, while simultaneously getting backups of two other systems. All that going on at once.
Supposedly it can transcode and stream out 4k video. But I don't have a 4k screen to actually test that.

Qnap/Synology/Theacus. I'd have no issues buying any of those.