It’s part of QNAP’s x72XT lineup of NASs that offer both dual Thunderbolt 3 ports as well as 10GbE on board for cross-platform collaboration between macOS and Windows users. Here are the best Apple-friendly NAS units to meet and exceed the now discontinued Time Capsule's features.The QNAP TVS-872XT is an 8-bay, Thunderbolt NAS designed primarily for video and media applications. A Network Attached Storage device can provide shared storage, a Time Machine backup target, and additional useful features for Mac, iPhone, and iPad users on a local area network - and beyond.
Best Nas 2018 Free But InEarlier it was known as NAS4Free but in 2018 its developer has renamed it to XigmaNAS. Let’s quickly look at the specifications of this NAS and then get into a bit about me and how I’ve been using this.NAS4Free is an Open Source Storage NAS (Network-Attached Storage) distribution based on FreeBSD. On paper, this is a really feature-rich NAS, and given its price, it ought to be. I’m running four 16TB IronWolf Pro hard drives from Seagate in RAID5, as well as four Seagate IronWolf 125 SSDs in RAID5 with 23% Over Provisioning. Leawo DVD Ripper is also good to go, but please note it is. Choosing between an SSD or HDD means.Leawo Bluray Ripper is my recommendation for both Windows and Mac users and I’d like to rate it as the best tool to easily rip and convert protected/homemade DVDs, like those from Disney, Beachbody Cize, to iPhone/iPad/Apple TV, Samsung Galaxy S9/S9 Plus, or rip directly to iTunes.I also like to have a copy of the shoot on something I bring home as an additional backup. While production will provide me with something like a 2-bay external RAID for delivery to post-production (G-Tech G-RAIDs are a popular option), those drives quickly choke when offloading multiple cameras and transcoding the previous batch of media at the same time.Unfortunately for me, production doesn’t usually have the budget to buy me a high-end all-flash RAID array for each job, so offloading that work is critical. The biggest bottleneck in most of this is drive speed. All of this, as you can imagine, is very data-intensive and this is where a device like the QNAP TVS-872XT comes in.Raw throughput is the name of the game, with multi-camera shoots capable of producing terabytes of data per day, with hours of footage needing to be transcoded. It’s a lot more involved than that, but I’m oversimplifying for the sake of brevity.In addition to image and color responsibilities, I’m also in charge of managing all of the data on set, including downloading footage from the camera, transcoding the digital camera negatives into a format for post-production, and creating “dailies,” which are smaller versions of the footage for the Director and Cinematographer to review at the end of the day. A DIT, briefly, is in charge of the color pipeline on film, television, and commercial sets, working with the Director of Photography to manage the image coming out of the camera to achieve the look and feel they desire. While RAID5 is generally discouraged for SSDs, these aren’t running 24/7, and Seagate rates these drives at 1.4 Petabytes of write endurance not accounting for over-provisioning, which for reference would mean I’d need to write 1TB per day, every single day, for over two and a half years.Like with the hard drives, I can lose a single drive and still keep working, and being SSDs, there are minimum speed penalties. This might seem like overkill, and frankly it kind of is, but I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard from a production a month after the shoot asking me if I’d happen to have a backup of the footage answering that with a yes is always nice.I’m also running four 1TB Seagate IronWolf 125 SSDs in RAID5 with 23% Over Provisioning, for a total usable capacity of 2TB. RAID5 also greatly increases my read speed, without sacrificing too much write speed and these huge 16TB drives are pretty quick for spinning rust, to begin with.The capacity also allows me ample room to store footage from jobs for months, as well as record live footage for playback for myself and the cinematographer. This provides me with a single drive failure tolerance which for my use case is fine, as the data is always backed up in at least two other locations. QNAP TVS-872XT Thunderbolt NAS Setup and PerformanceI’m running four 16TB Seagate IronWolf Pro hard drives from Seagate in RAID5 for a total of about 43TB usable. RAID0 is an option, but I don’t want to risk that. This allows me to offload media to other drives and transcode at the same time without slowing either process down, a sort of facsimile of storage tiering.I’m not using any NVMe drives in my NAS as the type of work I do doesn’t really benefit from a cache, and unfortunately, the NVMe drives are limited to only 2 lanes of PCIe, which would be slower than my SSD array. The SSDs are used for transcoding and moving footage to other drives. One of the best features for me is the ability to have all the data from the shoot day saved on it, bring it back to my home office, connect it up to my 10GbE network for backup to my other NAS and, if the job calls for it, edit the footage directly over the network on my Windows PC. The GoodLet’s go over the good things with this setup, because there’s a lot to like. Those numbers are not quite reflected in the above screenshot, but performance does spike up to that occasionally. It also has native video encoding for use with a Plex server or similar home media server. QNAP offers a wide variety of PCIe expansion card options, including Fiber channel, WiFi, additional Ethernet, and more, allowing this device to stay relevant and grow with your needs.The device itself is also pretty powerful, with 16GBs of RAM and a 6-core i5-8400T. With an empty PCIe slot, 8 drive bays, and 2 M.2 slots, there’s a huge variety of configurations you can have to suit your specific needs and workloads. Use a xbox one controller on mac for pcsx2The QFinder application in macOS is very easy to use and allows you to mount your storage pools easily, as well as keep the NAS updated with the latest firmware. I personally found this tool extremely helpful in getting every last drop of performance out of the Seagate IronWolf drives.QTier is a great tool to help manage your tiers of storage if you configure it with NVMe drives. Setting up and managing storage pools does require a bit of a learning curve, but once you figure it out, it’s not hard.QNAP also has a handy over-provisioning tool that allows you to test different levels of OP on your SSD pool to get the best balance of performance and usable capacity. It also has two 1GbE network ports as well for remote management, internet access, and offsite backup, if you’re so inclined.The connectivity doesn’t end there, though, as this device also has four USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps ports (two Type-A and two Type-C) for directly connecting external drives for fast backup or ingestion of data.From a software perspective, QNAP’s QTS operating system is fairly easy to use and if you’re already familiar with QNAP’s other devices, you’ll feel right at home with this one. Speaking of, having built-in 10GbE networking is a major plus in my book, as a device with this level of performance needs it. Having two Thunderbolt ports to connect to two different Macs directly, while also having the device available on a 10GbE network is an amazing feature.
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