Advice needed for Network Storage

[danb4026]

I am looking into different Network Storage devices to be used on my small home office network. Primarily it will be used for 3ds max asset storage (materials, maps, jpg's, proxies etc.) for distributed rendering, as well as a backup device.

 

I have 3 main computers that work together during DR or backburner, each of which have about 300GB of max assets stored on them. I do not use UNC, but rather have identical drive names with the same assets stored on each computer. I find this to be much faster than UNC, with all computers accessing the host's drive.

 

I would like to consolidate the assets onto one network drive, but maintain similar performance to what I have now.

 

Do you have any advice as to a quality Network Drive that is also reasonably priced for a small network like mine? I guess Bang for the Buck is what I am looking for.

[Lester_Masterson]

Try this out:

 

http://www.dlink.ca/products/?sec=0&pid=667

 

Hold 4 SATA Drives, Supports Gigabit Network, USB Print Server included.

 

$500 +/- here in the Great White North. (does not include drives)

 

I have had limited success with a old fashioned version. I simply can't imagine maintaining duplicate drives across several machines.

 

Kudos to you for lasting this long.

[ihabkal]

Sorry Lester, I will have to recommend a different one, not a particular one just something with a cpu.

get something with a 1.6+GHZ cpu, the transfer rates are three times that of one with a slower or without a cpu. I have an intel SS4000 for sale which does 15MB/second, for $100 but you pay shipping and customs. You do however want to spend more than $500 to get the intel SS4200 which transfers up to 35MB or even a little bit more.

Bottom line is the faster the cpu the faster the transfer, do a research online for reviews before you commit.

 

These machines are great. I can't live without mine. (I can but I donwanna)

 

P.S.: nice bike

[luckytohaveher]

1. Just remember, it won't be the drives that limit speed and load times. It will be NETWORK SPEED!
   
2. Load up a couple of gigabit cards and "bridge" the cards in the network connections box.
   
3. I really, really, really recommend SuperCache for the server side data drive location! I have seen AMAZING improvements, especially on repeated loads of library items.
   

 

http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/supercache.php

 

http://www.superspeed.com/servers/supercache.php

[danb4026]

Thanks for the advice guys. Networking is not my thing, so it is latin to me.

 

"Load up a couple of gigabit cards and "bridge" the cards in the network connections box"

 

What does that mean?

[Ernest Burden III]

I have a Buffalo TeraStation 1GB

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/terastation/

 

The thing is great as a NAS drive, just plug it in and it works. It also has a built-in utility (off by default for security) for internet access (via the maker's website) so you can get your data from anywhere using a web browser and user/pass. It adds 2 USB ports and a built-in print server so all computers can use a printer without having to keep one on all the time to 'host' it.

[danb4026]

Ernest....there a bunch of different ones, which model do you have? and I am assuming they don't come with the drives?

Edited May 20, 2009 by danb4026

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

You might as well make the hard drive configuration a RAID5 or 6 as well. This will increase the read/write speed of the drives, as well as create a backup in real time of your data. This way if a drive fails, you loose no work.

 

...Even though it increases the read/write speed, it will not effect network speed.

[danb4026]

The Buffalo TeraStation Pro II can do a Raid 5 configuration. Costs over $600 and I can not tell if it includes the hard drives.

[Ernest Burden III]

The Buffalo TeraStation Pro II can do a Raid 5 configuration. Costs over $600 and I can not tell if it includes the hard drives.

 

I think that's the one I have. It doesn't have a model ID on the front. The price includes the drives. Buy it, plug it in, use it. The default setting is for RAID5, which is what I wanted.

[Tim Nelson]

We had a TeraStation at our office once, and it was not good. Well, I think it technically worked fine, but it is not good for a multi-workstation environment when lots of computers need to read/write to it at the same time. It was especially noticeable using Vray proxies & irradience maps....it would hold things up so much, sometimes we had to move things to our actual server just to get it moving.

[ihabkal]

We had a TeraStation at our office once, and it was not good. Well, I think it technically worked fine, but it is not good for a multi-workstation environment when lots of computers need to read/write to it at the same time. It was especially noticeable using Vray proxies & irradience maps....it would hold things up so much, sometimes we had to move things to our actual server just to get it moving.

 

exactly why I said you need somethign with a cpu. the faster the better. good built in or addable network card + good cpu = good transfer rates.

By the way for many computers the only solution is to spend lots of money on an intel dual cpu network server. check intels website for options.

Edited May 21, 2009 by ihabkal

[danb4026]

This is a good example of why this issue is very difficult to come to a decision on. They are not cheap, and everyone has a different opinion.

 

I am a freelancer, rendering one project at a time, with 3 machines working in tandem. It is not an office environment with many users. I am, however, under the gun to get things done "yesterday" alot.

 

I too notice a real slow down with proxies and IR maps...they seem to be the real time consumers in a small network rendering environment.

 

I need a simple solution, that will speed things up and save disk space on my computer's drives by consolidating assets into a central location. Having raid 5 for safety would also be a plus (but I could continue with my online subscription for offsite backup). It has to be reliable because there is no IT guy here to get things working.

 

Thanks for all the input, although I am getting more confused!

[ihabkal]

with large proxies no NAS would keep up with the demand. you will need a local folder on each copmuter, like C:\proxies, and have your max proxy objects point to that local folder. some proxy trees and cars are over 100MB. and you don't make new proxies everyday, and if you do it is easy to copy it to each computer if the folders are shared. it will also prolong your storage device life which is equivalent to saving your work if you don't put htis heavy load on it all the time every time you do a test render.

 

I amgetting 35 to 45MB per second on this one

http://www.intel.com/design/servers/storage/ss4200/index.htm

 

my advice for your/my size is to get it and forget the rest.

it is intel after all.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I am not quite sure how proxies work, and what is cached locally. I am using Mental Ray. When I render animations, this first frame may take 12 minutes. All of the subsequent frames take 6 minutes. It seems like my proxies are being copied locally, and then cached on the hard drive for subsequent frames. This is just a guess though. This would account for the difference between the first frame, and all of the subsequent frames.

[ihabkal]

I use vray but I think it should be similar, the object representing the proxy should have a path related to it, this path if it points on the local drive would save you a lot of loading time, with a renderfarm pulling stuff from the NAS that would make things very slow no matter how fast that NAS is.

[danb4026]

First off, I use Vray....

 

Right now I have all of my proxies, maps, materials etc on the H Drive of each of my 3 computers, all with the same paths. I have a replicator program that, every evening (or when I tell it to), copies/synchronizes the H drive from my main computer to each of the other 2 machines, so that the files and paths are always the same.

 

The one pain with this method is related to IR maps and Light Cache files. Because these are constantly changing, when I do a DR or network render, I have to render without a final image created, save the IR and Light Cache, and copy those to the other machines. Then I turn "render final image" back on, and set IR and Light Cache to "from file".

 

I thought that having an NAS would alleviate any of these issues, besides freeing up drives on my computers. If it is going to make rendering take much longer, than it is not worth doing.

[ihabkal]

if you copy the IR map yourself through the network, it copies like any other file. When vray is rendering, if it pulls the IR map from the network during the rendering, it will take HOURS. vray starts copying all the IRmap, but at speeds of bytes per second, after 5 or 6 or 10 hours it then starts rendering. I don't know if this is a bug or if it was fixed by later versions,but this thing caused me many headaches. SO I would advise you not to use a NAS for saving the IR map to and then have your machines pull that out at time of rendering, it is a huge hassle.

Anyway if you have multiple machines rendering a single image via DR, then you don't really need to save the IR map, I have only savedit for animations, but for stills with quad core machines, things are fast enough that I don't need to, and besides every time you change something you nee to recalculate it...

[danb4026]

Your right about DR and calculating the IR map...it's really only a problem when doing final high res renders and, even then, its not that bad. I guess I could live with not doing it from saved file, and using the NAS for everything else.

 

I am going to look more into that intel 4200 and see where I can get the best deal.

[Matt Sugden]

I use a buffalo terrastation with my 8 pc render farm and it is fine. Since I've used a common storage area for all my files life has been a lot easier. The only thing I find is loading into photoshop is slow, but as long as you has a gigabyte LAN network connection I can't see why you'd be running slow, especially with only 3 pcs.

 

in my main pc I have a pair of removable terrabyte drives which I back up to and swap offsite every couple of weeks or so, so I always have three versions of my data, one offsite, incase my house burns down!

Edited May 24, 2009 by Bewdy

[ihabkal]

http://reviews.cnet.com/external-hard-drives/buffalo-terastation-home-server/4505-3190_7-31765598.html

see the transfer speed tests below, the best it did is 5 GB per 15 minutes, which is 16MB per second. I spent $2200 on the intel SS4000 which did 15MB per second, one year later they came out with the SS4200 which does 35MB per second minimum. so I upgraded and I have a $2200 paperweight now.

16mb/second is just to slow for photoshop opening and saving.

I noticed that all these NAS machines makers don't come clean: they all say that their machine is blazing fast, none says exactly how fast it is (except for Buffalo it seems?). I had to spend $2200 to test drive the intel offering myself.

Edited May 25, 2009 by ihabkal

[danb4026]

Ihab, that's stinks. How do you like the ss4200? I would also like to know how you ended up spending $2200. The ss4200 costs around $300 and the drives around $100 each. I couldn't see spending more than 800 bucks.

[ihabkal]

Ihab, that's stinks. How do you like the ss4200? I would also like to know how you ended up spending $2200. The ss4200 costs around $300 and the drives around $100 each. I couldn't see spending more than 800 bucks.

 

I live in Lebanon. these speciality items are imported on order, and by a few companies who take advantage and price it higher than the US.

Fedex alone takes $300-400 in shipping cost, hard drives used to cost twice as much last year, that's another $400, and customs and taxes also add a hefty 20% to the price.

I love my SS4200. All my files and libraries are on it. I hope I won't need to upgrade it in a year though, money is scarce these last few months.

[danb4026]

OK....I got the Buffalo Linkstation 4GB NAS. Seems to work great so far.

 

Should I put all of my Project Folders on there or just maps and materials?

 

My concern is that accessing actual Max files rather than just maps and materials might be a strain. I am asking this prior to actually transferring my project folders over. Thanks.

[Tim Nelson]

If you have compression turned on for your Max files, they should all be pretty small, so I wouldn't think that'd be a problem at all.