Stephen with Spin The Yarn Productions wrote:
I am a motion graphics artist by trade. After years of freelancing, just over a year ago, I started up a production company with a documentary filmmaker. Our skills complimented each others’, allowing our films to have an added graphics gloss and our animations to have a strong core of a good story. We called our company Spin The Yarn.
Up until this point, we’d both been using external hard drives to save project files. Files for film and animation can get very big and quickly eat up a 1TB drive in no time. This worked well when working as an individual, but with the two of us working on a project simultaneously, this wasn’t an ideal setup. We first tried having the disks connected to one mac, turning on disk sharing. This worked quite poorly as file sharing between the macs was very hit and miss. We’d constantly be hassling each other to restart file sharing and, if that didn’t work, restart the computer sharing the disks. A lot of wasted time, on top of having to have several disks plugged in, making things a lot more difficult to simply find a file.
I’d heard about FreeNAS before, so I started to look into it further. Not only would it allow us to have a network storage device, it would give us logins (quite useful for having private storage for each user) and, probably most importantly, ZFS. ZFS would allow us to have an array of disks, creating one single pool of storage space that could be split up into different disk shares. Not only that, but we can throw in more disks when needed to expand the pool. Excellent.
I set about building a FreeNAS server, after reading recommendations for suitable hardware, in the end going for an Intel i5 processor, 16GB of RAM and two 4TB WD Red drives. The operating system is running off of two USB mirrored thumb drives for redundancy. To make the NAS a proper member of the Spin The Yarn family, we’ve named him Nigel (N for NAS). The two 4TB drives are running in a mirrored layout and Nigel’s pinging me emails to let me know that he’s getting full (another very useful feature), so we’ll soon be opening him up to add another 2 4TB drives. With the experience we’ve had with FreeNAS so far, I’m not apprehensive about this at all, as from what I’ve read online, the process is pretty simple and painless.
Since working with Nigel all these months, we’re happy to say that it’s one of the most important investments we’ve made in the business so far (and that’s saying something for a company that produces film and animation. There’s always a new camera or graphics card we need to get). This is because Nigel gives us peace of mind, knowing that our data is secure, while also giving us an easy to access storage space that literally always works (there must be some kind of voodoo going on here somewhere, how can a computer not crash after running for a whole year?).
We’d like to give a huge thanks to everyone that makes FreeNAS what it is, from the developers beavering away to squash bugs and add new features, to iXsystems for maintaining this open platform while also ensuring it’s properly funded. Keep up the good work 🙂
