Last year I made a series of videos called the ‘Media Content Workflow Series’ where I upgraded the way that I approach video editing – and storing all my video files. I achieved this by building an NVMe Homelab NAS with a 10Gb networking switch, so that I could do really quick video editing over the network.

However I recently decided to go a different route with things, as I discuss in this video.

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone! Last year, I done a series of videos on this channel where I upgraded the way that I did video editing. And as part of that, I built a Homelab NAS. I put loads of NVMe storage in it and then a 10-gig networking card in that NAS and also my computer here. And then I started video editing over the network. And that was with the eventual aim that I might get a laptop as well and do all my video editing over the network, whether it’s in the house or even in a café. And that was the idea.

But then over the Christmas period, I decided to completely dismantle my Homelab NAS and turn it into a gaming computer, which you might have seen in a previous video. I called it the “OnlyFans Build,” and it was really fun. I’ll put the link up there if you wanted to check that out. But in this video, I basically wanted to talk through why I did a series of videos talking about how amazing video editing over the network is, and then I decided to scrap it all six months later. Well, not completely scrap it all, because I will move back to a Homelab NAS at some point. But yeah, let me just dive into the reasons.

The First Issue With My NAS Setup

So, the first reason I basically changed everything is my Homelab NAS had to be running 24/7 at the same time as I wanted to do video editing, of course, because I was accessing all the files over the network via the Homelab NAS. And that obviously makes sense, but it did mean that if I ever wanted to do any experiments or a new PC build via the Homelab NAS, or make any changes to it, I wouldn’t actually be able to do that and then still video edit because all my video files were actually stored on that Homelab NAS. And yes, that might have seemed obvious, but for some reason, it didn’t fully register to me.

I think it did register to me when I built the Homelab NAS and first started video editing for the network. But then the more I actually tried things out in practice, the less that actually worked for me. So, as a result, I started thinking, can I do something slightly different? And that’s where the second sort of reason I changed things comes in.

Gaming Content & Capture Cards

I wanted to start doing more gaming content and things like that on this channel. And while I don’t want to turn this channel into a gaming benchmarks channel and only do gaming content and nothing else, because I do want to cover other content, I thought it would still be pretty cool to have a dedicated gaming system somewhere in my house. In other words, my Homelab NAS, as I’ll touch on in a minute. And then this can be my stable workstation computer, where I do my video editing and some programming stuff and other things like that.

And to that end, I’ve actually bought a 4K capture card, and I’ve put it in this computer. And then the HDMI cable is connected to my Homelab NAS, aka my “OnlyFans Build” now. That one actually ultimately runs up through the walls into a capture card in this computer. And then I can capture that gaming content with no delay or anything like that, because if you do use something like OBS to actually record the screen while you’re gaming, you’re going to get less FPS rates and things like that, which is never ideal. And obviously, if you use an actual camera to record the screen, that’s not really great either.

And I think that’ll work out pretty good. And I got some future videos where I do use that capture card to actually gather gaming content via my “OnlyFans Build,” which I recorded on here. And that actually works pretty cool, so I’m excited to bring those videos to you.

Debian and Windows Dual Boot Woes

That actually brings me onto the next thing that was actually a little bit annoying about how I’d set up my Homelab NAS. Because I did intend on sometimes doing some gaming experiments and stuff on there, and that’s why I dual-booted Windows 11 on there. So I had it running as Debian as the main OS, but then I dual-booted Windows 11 Pro on it. And actually, I planned on booting into there, doing some gaming tests and stuff if I wanted, and then I could go back to Debian when I wanted to turn it back into a file server for video editing and stuff again.

But there was a problem with that. The way that I had actually set up the drives, even though I formatted them as NTFS, Windows could not see them. So I had my two NVMe drives, and Windows could see something was there in Device Manager, but it could never actually access the files. And I used loads of different programs and recovery programs, but there was just no way that Windows was actually seeing those Linux partitions and Linux disks. Even though I thought by formatting them as NTFS, Windows might actually be smart enough to read the data on there, but it simply wasn’t.

And what that meant was, when I did boot up into Windows mode, I couldn’t actually access any of the files there. And I ultimately then relied on just gaming and storing my games on the SATA SSD. But that was another flaw in my plan of actually having “the best of both worlds”—you know, the Debian file server and using that for video editing, and then Windows for some gaming stuff. That just didn’t work.

I quite like the phrase “KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.” And actually, by trying to do two things in one, it just wasn’t really working.

AM5/Ryzen 7600 Was Overkill (For A NAS)

And that brings me on to my next point, which is the actual hardware in my Homelab NAS was a little bit overkill. And I did do a video talking about why the AM5-based platform is pretty good for a Homelab NAS—namely that there’s lots of NVMe slots and sometimes more PCI Express lanes and things like that. But I think, in general, having a six-core Ryzen 7600 and a DDR5-based system was probably overkill for a Homelab NAS. Most of the time, you know, the CPU and the RAM and stuff just wasn’t really in use.

So I think it was a little bit overkill. But of course, having a DDR5-based system and a Ryzen 7600 is actually a great cornerstone of a budget gaming build or even potentially a 1440p gaming build. So what I did in the Black Friday sales is I bought some Corsair 6000MHz CL30 RAM. It was available at a fairly good price, actually, and already I can see an improvement in the general system performance and everything else just by upgrading the RAM. Because previously, I went with 4800MHz sticks of RAM. They were simply too slow, really. And again, that was fine for a Homelab NAS, but when it comes to generally using Windows or trying a game on it, that just wasn’t really sufficient.

So by upgrading that and also having a fairly decent mid-range CPU, I think that’s actually better for, you know, a gaming rig as well.

NVMe Drives Also Overkill

And that brings me on to my next point, which is that the NVMes were overkill as well. Because if they had 7000 megabytes per second of read speeds, for example, I put a 10-gigabit per second card in there. And actually, you know, when you work things out, a lot of that potential extra speed you could get with an NVMe drive was immediately wasted by being capped at 10 gigabits per second. Yes, that’s still faster than, you know, a 1-gig or 2.5-gig connection, but actually, you know, I went with the NVMe drives, and that turned out to be overkill again.

“Keep It Simple, Stupid.” And actually, the other problem with NVMes is the storage often caps out at 4TB. Yes, you can get 8TB NVMe drives, but they are very expensive, and it doesn’t scale accordingly. I think the 4TB drives are the sweet spot between price and storage benefit. And the same is sort of true with SATA SSDs too. But of course, mechanical hard drives, they regularly go up to 20TB or more of storage.

RAID FTW

And whilst I did conclude last year that actually they’d be too slow, I had actually forgotten a fundamental truth, which was RAID. I was regularly thinking in terms of RAID 1, so having two disks. And obviously, if one of them dies, you’ve still got your data on the other one, and that’s absolutely fine. But of course, with RAID 1, you don’t actually get that much of a performance boost.

And then I remembered that, back in the day, people used to use things like RAID 0 on a gaming rig. They’d pair two mechanical hard drives together and get double the read speeds. And that was quite popular before SATA SSDs came out. But obviously, when it comes to RAID, you’ve got lots of other RAID configurations—RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10, for example.

And while RAID 10 isn’t perfect because you effectively lose half the storage you buy, it is perfect from a performance standpoint. Because you basically get double or more of the actual read performance, depending on how many disks you add. It’s at least double, but it can be more than that. And you also get the disk redundancy, so you get the best of both worlds.

And when you actually work out the figures, because the read speeds are at least doubled, even on a mechanical hard drive, that’s actually often sufficient for video editing over the network. It’ll cap out a 2.5-gig link with no issue at all. And then you don’t need to worry about, you know, the overhead of 10-gigabit networking cards and switches, which can be both hot and quite expensive to buy and run. And that’s not really ideal.

So, the more I thought about things, the more I realized that actually having, in the long run—and I’ll talk about the future plans in a minute—but in the long run, actually having a Homelab NAS full of mechanical hard drives in RAID 10, for example, that might actually work out better for me.

My Current ‘Temporary’ Setup

So over the Christmas period, I took out the motherboard and obviously kept the CPU, upgraded the RAM, and also the CPU cooler. And I turned it into a mini gaming system, as you might have seen in the “OnlyFans PC Build” video. And I think actually that’s a better use for that particular hardware.

In terms of the NVMes, what I did—I kept one of them in the Homelab NAS, in other words, the new computer system for gaming. And I’ll put all my games on there and the operating system and everything else, so that’s just a single drive setup, and that will work fairly well. And then what I did with the other NVMe drive is I moved all my video content just to that one, and then I stuck it in this computer.

And basically, temporarily, I’ve gone back to local editing. So, I’m not doing it over the network, I’m doing it all on here. So, I’ve got my single NVMe storage disk with most of my media content. But what I’ve also done is I had an old 4TB hard drive lying around, so I put that in this computer as well. And then that allows me to actually—if I run out of disk space, I can put some of my old media content that I don’t use very often on that. And then maybe I have more of my commonly used clips and my active projects on my NVMe drive.

And yes, that only gives me like 8TB of space in total before I run out, compared to my Homelab NAS where the original plan was I could just keep adding NVMe drives in there and end up with like 28TB of storage if I really needed it. So, I’m not going to quite have that benefit right now. But actually, I haven’t wasted any of the hardware that I bought last year, other than the two PCI Express networking cards and also the Ubiquiti switch. I’ve actually got rid of both of those and sold them just in the name of simplicity and “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

Was All Effort Wasted?

But most of the stuff I actually learned—you know, I’ve still got that knowledge about editing over the network and all that. I know I still want to do that in the long run, and I’ve also kept most of the hardware, as I mentioned. So, I don’t feel that I’ve wasted too much of my time last year. But sorry for making a series of videos and then, you know, ripping it all apart right after finishing those series of videos. Sorry!

But that almost wraps things up. I wanted to do a video where I just updated everyone on how I’m editing videos and why, instead of having, you know, an AM4-based system and a Homelab NAS, I’ve now got, you know, a gaming system and my workstation computer. One of which is on AM4, and one of them is AM5.

My Future Plans

So, I wanted to do this video and talk about that. And then, going forward, I will get a NAS. I’ll either build my own or do something like, you know, use QNAP or Synology or Asustor—what are they called? Asustor? Something like that. I’ll probably—I might actually do something like that, just because otherwise you’ve got the headache of actually, you know, managing your own NAS and working out whether to go with TrueNAS, Unraid, HexOS, or OpenMediaVault, or anything like that.

But actually getting, like, a NAS, for example—as long as it’s got at least 2.5-gig networking—that might actually work out better for me. It’s just simpler. I can put in four mechanical hard drives, 20 terabytes, for example, and that’ll actually give me pretty much all of the video editing performance I need over the network.

And that wraps up this video! If you had any questions or comments about what I’ve discussed, please do leave me a comment. And thank you for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please click the thumbs-up button and please subscribe to see more videos like this. Thanks for watching.