Advice Please for Setting up a TerraMaster F5-221 NAS for 4k Video Editing and Movie Storage: RAID 5 Configuration and beyond

Tekuza on 27/05/2023 - 14:52
Last edited 27/05/2023 - 16:29 by 1 other user

I recently purchased a TerraMaster F5-221 NAS and 4 x 20TB hard drives on a great deals from OzBargain. I plan to use this NAS for my 4k movies and video editing files, so I want to have as much space available while still having some protection. After doing some research, I’m considering setting it up in a RAID 5 configuration since it provides both data protection and good storage capacity. With this configuration, I’ll have 60TB of available space.

However, since the TerraMaster is only a 5-bay slot, I’m wondering what would happen if I add an extra 20TB hard drive after setting up the RAID. Will I be able to increase the available space without losing everything or will I have to reset the RAID? Also, would adding another hard drive affect the performance or speed of my NAS?

I would appreciate any advice or recommendations from the community regarding this setup. Additionally, if you have suggestions for other configurations that provide both data protection and storage capacity for movie and video editing files, please do let me know.

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  CyberMurning on 27/05/2023 - 15:13

  +2

  I have synology and this is a good link
  https://www.synology.com/en-au/support/RAID_calculator

  Yes i believe in most nas and raid, you can add a drive and it will rebuild the raid (takes time though) without reset.
  With mine, i can even still using the nas no problem during the process

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  CyberMurning on 27/05/2023 - 15:15

  +1

  But, becareful as i think on mosr raid you can only add the same size of hdd (different brand okay)
  With synology shr, you can mix and match.

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  rldowling03 on 27/05/2023 - 15:16

  +1

  If you're thinking of adding in disks at a later point, Unraid is a good choice, it provides protection (up to 2 drives failing) but wont give you any speed boosts that you'd get with Raid 5 (although you can add in a NVME cache drive and get some benefits there). Unraid allows you to add as many disks as you want, as long as they are the same size or lower, so it makes it easy to just add in new drives later as sales come up.

  They have ZFS in their beta branch at the moment which I'm currently using with 4 SSD drives and it's been working great, also gives you configurable protection but with the speed boost that Raid 5 gives.

  Unraid also comes with a bunch of options for running containers for various different things if you're into that, things like running Plex server, or torrent/usenet downloaders, there's thousands of applications on there, including running VMs/

  May be something worth looking into and seeing if you want to go down that path, if you really want to add disks later on without any hassle, it's probably the way to go. For me it's mostly been set and forget, no real issues with it for like 5-6 years.

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  RiseAndRuin on 27/05/2023 - 15:54

  One major limiting factor will be the 1Gb nic, can you add a faster interface on this model?

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  stampella on 27/05/2023 - 18:57

  +1

  Do you plan to do editing directly on the NAS or use it just as storage? I had to setup 10G links to the workstations and a good SSD for scratch files and sources with HDDs for long-term archiving to make it happen all in the NAS.
  1G NIC will be unable to give you the throughput you need to edit directly on the NAS, especially if you want to deal with 4K (although you do not necessarily have to edit in 4K).

  • 

    Tekuza on 28/05/2023 - 08:31

    Mostly for storage and maybe 10Tb or so for plex since it has 4k hardware streaming capabilities. Most of my editing is normally on the nvme and then move over to the NAS