Well, if you're saying that Vegas will improve equally, and directly related to faster data access, efficiently without waste, then I can't justify a NAS for the truly demanding needs.

http://www.qnap.com/

Review of the QNAP TS-809 here:

http://www.techspot.com/review/225-qnap-ts-809-pro-turbo-nas/

Street price around $2,700 + disks.

Beats the 5200 by a wide margin.

Bob.

It depends.
Highly compressed video demands more CPU. Moores law isn't working out like it used to. Clock speeds have hit a bit of a brick wall and to get more MIPs more cores are being used. Problem is a lot of video tasks cannot be split over cores or threads. Solution is to use less compression or transcode to less compressed codecs.
It's easier to scale bandwidth than CPU power. You can throw as much money as you can at Intel but they just cannot make faster CPUs. You can throw lots of money at uber fast storage and you do get more for your money but the cost / benefit curve is far from linear.

If you want to play HD full raster with FXs you do need fast disks and fast CPUs. Using uncompressed or lightly compressed video can help reach this goal.


At the end of the day though why use a NAS?
It brings zero to the table. You're paying money to connect your fast disks to a slow interface. It makes no sense. The OP is using SATA port multipliers, cheap, simple way to get what he wants. Your solution offers what over his?
He doesn't need to share the files by the sound of it. Sorry but I'm at a loss to see any advantage using a NAS and several disadvantages.

Bob.

The OP already figured out the optimal solution to his problem and he was looking for opinions from us on his well-researched solution.

Hanging individual drives off of an SATA controller is going to be the fastest way to go. It is preferable that the eSATA controller card plugged into the PCIe bus and not the PCI bus since the old PCI bus is only capable of 133 megabytes/second. PCIe can have between 1 and up to 16 "lanes" and each lane is capable of either 250 MB/s (PCIe 1.0) or 500 MB/s (PCIe 2.0). This is a moot point since the card that comes with the Rosewill RSV-S4-X is indeed PCIe.

Rosto99, I'd say you did your homework, just order it and enjoy.

What he has now is a one-trick pony, does a small thing well., but doesn't consolidate the disks, doesn't relieve the backup burden, is not inherently failsafe, and doesn't provide any extra features that could be utilized one day like webserver, ftp, http, DLNA, user level security, etc.

On the other hand, if system performance is compromised then no it's not a good deal.

Obviously it would depend on the needs of the user. I got the impression that the OP was a knowledgeable computer person, but might not be aware of how versatile these little NAS boxes are in terms of other things they can do besides serve data..

John, he wants to use Windows Home Server for Krysakes, and NEVER mentioned ANYTHING about demanding workflow. His biggest gripe was too many separate disks and needing to access them all at the same time, that makes him a NAS candidate too.


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At the end of the day though why use a NAS?
It brings zero to the table. You're paying money to connect your fast disks to a slow interface. It makes no sense. The OP is using SATA port multipliers, cheap, simple way to get what he wants. Your solution offers what over his?

Congratulations, BudWzr, you have found a LONGER route to India.

The OP's biggest gripe was too many separate discs that he could only access two at a time using external docks, the Rosewill unit will allow him to do EXACTLY what he wants to do; have them all in an enclosure(s) and access them simultaneously using the fastest interface. He also has the option of easily swapping out individual discs so he has a maximum of eight of them available at any one time.

You promised you'd shut up if I agreed with you, OK, here goes; "I agree, an NAS is one way to store files."

I had my fingers crossed, but I'm a man of my words. And I didn't say I'd "Shut Up", I agreed to lurk more and post less, so let's see some good interesting posts to keep me thinking and not yakking, or in the words of our Governer, "Aaahhlll be baaacckkk".

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You promised you'd shut up if I agreed with you, OK, here goes; "I agree, an NAS is one way to store files."

John, I DID learn how to make one of these from you, don't know if I'll need them, but I've got some doozies.ready ;)



Hey, somebody fooled with my account!

Thanks to all for your input and glad to see your are back John Cline!

I do read many of your post John and your are a great contributor to this forum and so are others among this forum.

Rob

Thanks, Rob. When you do order the box and get it installed, I think that there would be a bunch of people here that would be interested in how well it works. The price is right and it should be very zippy. Please post a mini-review here when you've had some time to test drive it for a while.