Help choosing Best NAS System for 4-5 Node Renderfarm

#1

Hey all,

So I need the advice of some people with experience in this area. I am currently building a render farm setup with 4-5 computers connected via Gigabit Ethernet through an 8-port d-link switch. The computer specs are below and I will be using Maya, Cinema 4d, 3ds Max, and some Nuke. I will also be using Deadline 5 (possibly upgrading to 6) to manage the exports. I will be using VRAY Distributed Rendering and Mental Ray, depending on what I’m working on. When rendering animation Deadline will be managing things.

So my question is what is the best NAS Storage system to use for storing the files on for rendering? And Gigabit Ethernet and 8-port switch is still the best method in connecting them? Any input is appreciated! I was thinking something the QNAP TS-469 Pro possibly

http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=81794&vpn=TS-469%20PRO&manufacture=QNAP%20Systems%20Inc.

with WD Red NAS Drives

Computer Specs:

Master-

Dual 6-core Xeons running at 4GHz
48GB DDR3 Memory
EVGA SR-2 Motherboard
Quadro K5000 4GB Graphics Card
240GB SSD System Drive
6TB Storage
and the other usual computers parts :slight_smile:

Slaves- 3 systems so far, but may add one more after

3930k 6-core CPU running at 4.5GHz
16GB DDR3 Memory (probably going to upgrade to 32gb per system)
Basic GT 610 Graphics card
120GB SSD System Drive
and the other usual system components

Thoughts and recommendation are appreciated, thanks so much :slight_smile:

#2

That’s a fine NAS but the price is completely unreasonable for what you get in my opinion. I’d trying using a workstation as a file server and render queue server with only a few nodes like that. If the load from serving files bogs down the workstation I’d consider setting up a file server machine for the same price ($800 or $900 sans disks) rather than relying on a prosumer NAS so it could be expanded and upgraded as needed, for example 10GbE or more memory for the buffer cache.

It’s not all that unreasonable to consider 10GbE in the next year or two, especially for compositing workstations and render nodes. The adapters are down to $350 (Intel X540) and the switches are under $1,000 (Netgear XS708E, 8 ports). Next year those prices will come down even more as we start seeing workstation and server motherboards come with 10GbE onboard like some SuperMicro systems already do. I personally wouldn’t want a NAS with a non-upgradable network interface.

The NAS selection aside, the disks don’t need to be “NAS” or “enterprise” specific models unless using a hardware RAID controller. The only noteworthy difference in the drives is TLER, ERC, or CCTL. Those acronyms are all the same firmware feature just from different manufacturers. The feature tells the RAID controller the drive was unable to recover a bad sector after a few seconds. Then the controller just recovers the data from the RAID parity or mirror.

If the drive doesn’t have this feature the hardware RAID controller assumes the disk has died since it hasn’t responded for a minute or two because the disk is trying to recover a bad sector on it’s own (this is when people complain about drives “dropping” from an array when the disk otherwise works fine). Prosumer NAS devices don’t use hardware RAID controllers so you can use whatever hard drives you want and they’ll work just fine. If you build a file server with a hardware RAID controller the type of disk will matter but that’s another topic because there are modern alternatives to hardware RAID controllers like ZFS.

#3

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.