Video Content Takes Up Too Much Space! My Plan Going Forward
Due to my CCTV system and all the videos I’m producing for Tech Overwrite, I recently ran out of disk space on:
- My workstation PC (512GB)
- My Synology NAS (4TB)
- My Synology C2 backup space (1TB)
Whoops. Plus my current home network and NAS is too slow to accommodate network-based video editing, so I have ended up having video files across a range of devices – which isn’t ideal.
So today I am launching a new series of videos where I will invest in a few new devices that will HOPEFULLY improve my media storage and workflow process going forward. I discuss my plans 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, so this is the first video in a new series that I’m going to be doing, and I’m really excited to launch this series. With this channel I’m NOW producing a fair bit of video content – which I’m really enjoying, BUT I’ve completely run out of disk space as a result. My PC has a 512 Gig NVMe drive which I’ve basically maxed out. I do have a 4 terabyte NAS over there, but this also stores all my CCTV camera recordings so that’s full up too. I also have 1 terabyte of cloud backup space, but this is full up too, meaning that Synology recently suspended my backup job:
Whoops. So I’m going to be doing a series of videos showing exactly HOW I’m fixing all of this, and hopefully streamlining my video editing workflow in the process.
I Can Haz Problems
So right now I have three main “types” of problems. Well, more if you count my personal problems but three tech problems.
The first is that, as I just mentioned, I’m a bit limited in terms of my disk space. While 4 terabytes on my NAS might sound like a lot, it’s running old school hard drives – and so these are just too slow to mount as a network drive on my PC, and then use them for 4K video editing. Plus my Synology NAS is limited to Gigabit networking speeds and ideally I need AT LEAST 2 and a half Gig speeds for 4K editing.
What I could do, of course, is just buy a bigger NVMe drive for my PC and then store all my media on that, but I don’t leave this PC on 24/7 so if I ever wanted to do video editing off my laptop instead, I wouldn’t have access to those media files.
The second problem is that my video editing workflow isn’t very organized. I have my active projects on my PC, but this regularly runs out of disk space because half a terabyte isn’t enough for media projects. I then move the files to my NAS, but as I mentioned before, there isn’t much free space there because I store my CCTV on it too, PLUS if I wanted to use a video clip from last year, for example, it’s too slow to stream that directly from my NAS. SO I then need to drag it back to my PC, which can take a few minutes if it’s a big file – plus this makes my PC EVEN MORE short on disk space.
The final problem is that, as I mentioned in the intro, I only have 1 terabyte of Synology C2 backup space – and this is now completely full up, due to all the video content from this channel. Unfortunately C2 is a bit too expensive to upgrade beyond 1 terabyte, so I need to explore alternative backup space.
Bring Me Solutions, Not Problems!
What is it that rubbish managers say? Oh yeah…
Bring me solutions, not problems!
– every rubbish manager, 5000 BC – 2024 AC
There’s a few things that I’m going to do, boss. Firstly I NOW realize that I need some sort of SEPARATE network-attached device that will SOLELY be used for video content. This should have 10 Gigabit networking, so that I can mount this as a network drive on my workstation PC and then I won’t experience any slowness when choosing clips to show. Naturally this new NAS shouldn’t use mechanical hard drives though, because they would be too slow. So my main options are to either buy a 10 Gigabit Synology NAS and insert SSDs into it, or build my own Homelab NAS.
Synology are great, but this option would be EXPENSIVE – and not as flexible as rolling my own solution. Plus I’m kinda wanting to build a new PC, if I’m honest. So my first solution will be to build a brand new PC, make sure that it has 10 Gigabit networking, run Linux (or TrueNAS) on it, and stick a 4 terabyte NVMe drive in it. This will give me a good amount of network attached storage for 4K video editing, however if I choose the right motherboard, I can always get multiple NVMe drives and potentially have 12 or even 16 Terabytes of super fast storage. I’d be living the dream.
Next up, I’ll need to upgrade my study to have 10 Gigabit networking – right now I have some CAT5E cables in the mix, plus a 1 Gigabit Netgear switch.
So I’ll buy a 10 Gigabit switch, and also move to CAT6A cables. I also previously purchased two 10 Gigabit networking cards on eBay (because they were really cheap… hopefully they work) – one will go in my new HomeLab server, and the other will go into my workstation PC. Maybe. This actually supports 2 and a half Gig speeds through the motherboard, which MIGHT be enough, but I’ll see how it goes.
Finally I’ll need to get more than 1 terabyte of backup space so that I can backup ALL my media content to an offsite location without fear that my backup jobs will be suspended for maxing out my quota.
I THINK that this is a pretty good plan. If I’ve missed anything though, please do let me know down in the comments. I’m excited for this new series of videos though – while having a NAS, a 12-core workstation PC and Gigabit networking everywhere might SOUND good, it’s surprising how sluggish this sometimes feels when dealing with 4K video.
In the next day or two I’ll be releasing the second video in this series (which will appear here somewhere), and this will discuss all the different backup storage options I evaluated, and which one I ended up going for. This seemed like a sensible place to start since I totally ran out of backup space and Synology suspended me. I’m not bitter though. You suck Synology. Kidding.