Projects for graphic and video studios are growing, where a few GB in a folder used to suffice, today video production or 3D scenes easily take up hundreds of GB to single-digit TB. The local disk in a workstation is no longer sufficient, nor is the way teams share and back up data.
Why NAS
A network-attached storage (NAS) provides the team with a single central location for projects, accessible to everyone from workstations and laptops, without copying files between people via flash drives or public cloud services.
Compared to standard cloud storage, a NAS in the studio offers advantages in speed. It operates over the local network, and in that large data remains physically with you.
RAID and drive reliability
A NAS consists of multiple disks in a RAID array, which protects data against the failure of a single disk. However, RAID itself is not a backup, only protection against hardware failure, this must always be kept in mind.
For studios, the standard choice is RAID 5 or RAID 6 for larger arrays, or RAID 10 where performance is the priority. The selection depends on the number of drives, required capacity, and tolerance for an additional drive failure during array rebuild.
NAS drives should be selected for continuous operation rather than standard desktop models; they feature different error-handling behaviour and a longer expected lifespan under 24-hour daily, seven-day weekly load conditions.
10GbE: when is it worth it?
A gigabit network is sufficient for routine office work, but when handling video files or large PSD or AI files over the network, it becomes a bottleneck, opening files takes too long and previews lag.
10GbE accelerates data transfer by approximately tenfold and is now cost-effective even for smaller studios, all that's needed is a NAS and workstations with a 10G network card, or optionally a switch with a few 10G ports between key stations.
The entire network does not need to be upgraded at once. Often, it is sufficient to connect only the NAS and workstations that handle large files most intensively, such as video editors or 3D graphics designers, via 10G, while the rest of the office can remain on gigabit.
Work on TB projects
For large projects, it pays to have a well-thought-out folder structure and data lifecycle, active projects on fast storage, completed jobs moved to an archive on slower, cheaper drives. How to set up the archive and backups is described in our article about ipjtech.cz backing up a graphic studio.
Setting quotas and continuously monitoring free space on the NAS prevents unpleasant surprises mid-render when storage runs out.
Access rights and component organisation
The larger the team and the more projects running concurrently, the more it pays to have a clear folder structure on the NAS with access rights based on role, not just on who created which folder when. A junior graphic designer should not have write access to the archive of completed projects; an external contractor should see only their specific project folder, not the entire studio storage.
It is also worthwhile to name project folders from the start according to a uniform convention, date or order number, client name, brief description, so that in the storage it is possible to quickly find what is needed, even after months when no one remembers the details of the order.
Cache disks for active projects
Even with a fast 10G network, a local NVMe disk in a workstation remains faster than any network storage. For demanding tasks - high-resolution video editing or working with extensive 3D scenes - it makes sense to keep the active project temporarily on the local drive as a working cache and only synchronise it back to the NAS as a shared version for the team once that phase is complete. This is a compromise between the speed of a local disk and the security of central storage, which pays off when established as a clear rule rather than left to each graphic designer's random improvisation.
File versioning
NAS solutions typically offer file system-level snapshots, allowing you to revert a folder to a previous state without needing to manually store a complete backup of every version.
This is a useful supplement to versioning within the application itself, but it does not replace an off-site backup, if the entire array or NAS enclosure fails, snapshots on the same device will not help. We also mention NAS storage in the context of Adobe Creative Cloud license, where a similar question is addressed: where the team should actually work with files.
Are you dealing with capacity or storage speed in your studio?
We will design a NAS, RAID array and a 10G network with room for data volume growth.