Upgrading From M1 Max to M4 Max using a NAS

[handeyman]

Hey guys,

I currently use a Mac Studio M1 Max with Adobe Premiere for professional podcast editing work. We edit off a 6 Bay HDD NAS using 10gbps ethernet... So not a super fast SSD or the internal SSD. We do 4 camera 4k multicamera talking head edits mainly.

Do you think upgrading to the m4 max will see a significant increase in performance editing or exporting?

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[MacPoulet]

What do you currently find slow on the M1 Max?

Honestly, with that setup, I don't see how the Studio is your bottleneck. You may find editing off SSDs in a NAS might improve your workflow, but without more to go on, I can't say.

 

[aUsern@me]

10 gigabits per second = 1250 megabytes per second
Let's call it 1000 MB/s with overhead. At best, presuming spinny drives, that NAS is pushing 600 MB/s. I'd say it's more realistic that it's around 400 MB/s. You didn't mention file format, but let's say 4K ProRes 422, since it's pretty popular - that's ≈100 MB/s

Likely, bandwidth is not your problem with NAS for a single user. Now, you didn't mention how many people are working off this NAS. If it's more than two or three that changes things. And, latency can exist with hard disks as they spin up and down and seek.

Personally, I'd copy the working files on/off the NAS to the internal SSD for local work. But that takes lots of file discipline, management and coordination with any other users.

To answer your question, "no," I don't think an M4 Max would significantly improve your editing, exporting or workflow.

 

[handeyman]

10 gigabits per second = 1250 megabytes per second
Let's call it 1000 MB/s with overhead. At best, presuming spinny drives, that NAS is pushing 600 MB/s. I'd say it's more realistic that it's around 400 MB/s. You didn't mention file format, but let's say 4K ProRes 422, since it's pretty popular - that's ≈100 MB/s

Likely, bandwidth is not your problem with NAS for a single user. Now, you didn't mention how many people are working off this NAS. If it's more than two or three that changes things. And, latency can exist with hard disks as they spin up and down and seek.

Personally, I'd copy the working files on/off the NAS to the internal SSD for local work. But that takes lots of file discipline, management and coordination with any other users.

To answer your question, "no," I don't think an M4 Max would significantly improve your editing, exporting or workflow.

Appreciate this, sounds about right, and to clarify, only one person is editing off the nas at once, mostly h264 420 files.

 

[aUsern@me]

Appreciate this, sounds about right, and to clarify, only one person is editing off the nas at once, mostly h264 420 files.

I can't imagine 4K H.264 needing more than 50 MB/s. Both your NAS and M1 Max should be able to handle that with no problems whatsoever. Though, if it is just one person doing the edits, there's really no reason not to copy to the internal SSD. Everything will feel much faster.

 

[Chancha]

A 6-bay NAS filled with modern helium drives actually have a good chance saturating a 10GbE link. If you use like a Synology DS1621+, with 6 Ultrastar HC series drives which can do approx 200MB/s sequential, striped as RAID-5, it is already close / matching the 10GbE link. It also has dual NVMe slot which you can add some GBs / TBs of cache which also speed things up (but yeah it helps more on smaller files random than larger file sequential).

 

[handeyman]

A 6-bay NAS filled with modern helium drives actually have a good chance saturating a 10GbE link. If you use like a Synology DS1621+, with 6 Ultrastar HC series drives which can do approx 200MB/s sequential, striped as RAID-5, it is already close / matching the 10GbE link. It also has dual NVMe slot which you can add some GBs / TBs of cache which also speed things up (but yeah it helps more on smaller files random than larger file sequential).

I have a qnap with modern drives and NVMe slots are being used as well.

 

[MediaGary]

Just some data points for this discussion:

I have a home-built 6-drive (8TB Ironwolf) RAIDz1 NAS based on TrueNAS Core. The network attachment is a 10GbE Solarflare 5122F (MMF). When the drives were 'empty' filling them went at ~600MByte/s. Now that it's ~60% full, write speeds are down to ~450MByte/s, and read speeds jump around between ~200 and ~600 MByte/s.

My work is mostly 4-or-5-camera multicam 150Mbps 4k 10-bit 4:2:2. I have found that the inconsistent NAS read speeds even as a single user have guided my workflow decisions, because there were occasional stutters related to the I/O. Now, I copy all the SD cards of a project onto the Thunderbolt-attached U.2 NVMe drives, and then make an identical backup folder on the TrueNAS server. As the project develops/finishes, the DRP file (DaVinci Resolve) will go to the NAS too. As configured, I am only using two lanes of Thunderbolt connectivity to most of the U.2 drives, so r/w is 'only' ~1400MByte/s, but certainly more than adequate. I am experimenting with a U.2 RAID-0 Thunderbolt now for 'full throughput' but I think the only operational benefit will be a reduction in the number of places to look for my projects.

I displaced the M2 Pro Mini 10c/16g/16r/512GB a few weeks ago with a M4 Max 16c/40g/48r/1TB. The other editing machine is a Win10 5950x/Intel ARC A770 16GB with 64GB RAM. The Win10 machine was superior to the M2 Pro for noise reduction, relight, warp, and other GPU-intensive stuff. I think I will no longer need the Win10 machine now that the M4 Studio is here. [The M2 Mini Pro had 10GbE to the NAS via an OWC Thunderbolt Dock.]

 

[aUsern@me]

At best, presuming spinny drives, that NAS is pushing 600 MB/s.

A 6-bay NAS filled with modern helium drives actually have a good chance saturating a 10GbE link.

When the drives were 'empty' filling them went at ~600MByte/s. Now that it's ~60% full, write speeds are down to ~450MByte/s, and read speeds jump around between ~200 and ~600 MByte/s.

Not to derail the handeyman's thread, but this is some interesting anecdata. Chancha, I've never seen those kinds of speeds from a Synology, or any NAS, in a six-bay, RAID 5 config. But, I've never filled a NAS with modern, 7200 RPM, helium Ultrastars. When you wrote, "…have a good chance of saturating a 10GbE link," I'm curious what you've witnessed and under what conditions.

If I could get a spinny NAS that reliably pushes out ≈1000 MB/s I might need to seriously investigate.

 

[Chancha]

Not to derail the handeyman's thread, but this is some interesting anecdata. Chancha, I've never seen those kinds of speeds from a Synology, or any NAS, in a six-bay, RAID 5 config. But, I've never filled a NAS with modern, 7200 RPM, helium Ultrastars. When you wrote, "…have a good chance of saturating a 10GbE link," I'm curious what you've witnessed and under what conditions.

If I could get a spinny NAS that reliably pushes out ≈1000 MB/s I might need to seriously investigate.

I have witnessed 1200MB/s+ on my DS1821+ under some right conditions, it is filled with shucked HC white label 12TB which are supposed to be firmware nerfed HC 14TB, so down from the original 7200 to 5400 rpm. And I was using NVMe read+write cache. The NAS also has dual SFP+ card with a 20G load balanced LAGG to a 20G switch, and the above speed was seen on a Mac Studio with its internal AQC 10GeB NIC to it. I am positive the NVMe didn’t help because they were already 99% filled all times.

And now I have to think more clearly, I seem to recall Synology’s own support document for DS1621+ saying it was tested to be able to do like 900MB/s with spinning HDDs (probably their own Toshiba rebranded drives which are hardly the fastest).

But yeah my above reply was more a napkin math than a serious statement with direct evidence, I do have experience with 6-bay but it was a DS1618+ and never filled it with good drives. Also I consider 900MB/s to 1GB/s a good enough real world performance to be claimed “saturating a 10GbE link” with overhead / efficiency considered. The other poster’s 400MB/s is quite pessimistic.

Either way, OP is using a QNAP, which has even more chance to maintain that kind of speed when configured right. My general napkin math nowadays is to consider any CMR HDDs to be able to sustain 200MB/s each.