Sense checking first setup

[Enquiries]

Here are my requirements and current train of though. Worth noting that I’m totally new to NAS and most things I’ve learned over the past week, mostly from your very useful YouTube channel which is awesome.

- 3 workstations which will be connected via 10 GBE and 10 GBE switch
- Within a few years I’d like to have 5-6 computers connected
- Primary usage is working project files for 3D content creation and rendering but also compositing which would pull lots of image sequences off the NAS. Having more than one connection I think the type of use will be random access.
- Would like to have a setup that saturates the network and gives as close to the 1000 mbps read / write as possible (or feasible)
- I think 30-40TB of working storage should be ok
- Even though I will want a backup of the drive at all times, I do want a good level of redundancy to ensure smooth continuous operation
- This is the first network in the office, currently local machines only, so a desktop solution over rack mounted solution
- I have in mind a very rough £3k budget including drives but getting a decent speed is worth paying extra
- From all your very useful guides and videos I’m currently thinking QNAP TS-h973ax is a good base
- From what I have seen, RAID 10 seems a better choice than 5 or 6, because of the speed and redundancy
- Current thought is having 4x16gb drives would give 32gb of usable space, although not sure about the SSD caching in terms of size and speed, especially given third QNAP has 2 different types.
- Not sure if the non ECC memory is an issue in this QNAP box, or how much memory would be best for this setup.
- Open to other configurations

Offering your considerable and unbiased knowledge on this subject to the public is a great thing and I thank you wholeheartedly for doing so. ";}

[ed]

QNAP TS-h973ax is a good all in one solution. It has 10gbe and NVMe caching. On top of that, you also get to use U.2 drives for storage to achieve greater speeds compared to HDD RAID. If you only need 1GbE speeds, then those 5-6 people sharing a 10Gbit connection will achieve what you need.
RAID10 is a popular choice to achieve the best performance. But if redundancy is very important, then RAID6 will be a safer choice (RAID10 has only 2 drive redundancy if only one drive in each "RAID1" group fails). Either way, all performance demanding tasks can be done on SSD media and HDD pool could be used only for archiving and finished project sharing.
If you need something that allows more 10gbe or even Thunderbolt connectivity, then Qnap 88X series will be a way to go.

I hope this helps.