NAS for Video Editing: How to Choose the Right Setup

Choose your NAS around where you edit, how much bandwidth your footage requires, and how many editors need simultaneous access.

• If you edit from a local SSD and use the NAS for backup and completed projects, a two-bay NAS with 2.5GbE can be enough.
• If you edit full-resolution footage directly from the NAS, start with four bays and 10GbE, then verify that the storage pool can sustain your timeline.
• If several editors share the same media, prioritize additional drive bays, aggregate storage performance, and a fast connection for every workstation.

Can You Edit Directly From a NAS Without Dropped Frames?

Yes, provided that the complete storage path can sustain the footage bitrate with adequate headroom.

Required throughput ≈ (codec bitrate in Mbps ÷ 8) × simultaneous streams × 1.25

Dividing by eight converts megabits per second to megabytes per second. The 1.25 multiplier adds 25 percent of planning headroom for network overhead, bitrate variation, and background activity.

Find the bitrate of your footage

Resolution, frame rate, bit depth, chroma sampling, compression ratio, and camera settings can produce very different data rates within the same codec family.

H.264, HEVC, and camera raw users should check the recording setting, camera documentation, or file metadata for the actual clip bitrate.

Apple publishes target data rates for ProRes. The following figures apply to UHD 4K footage at 3840 × 2160 and 30 fps.

Double these figures for 60 fps footage.

Calculate the throughput your timeline needs

A single 100Mbps H.264 or HEVC stream requires:

100 ÷ 8 × 1.25 = 15.6 MB/s

One UHD 4K ProRes 422 HQ stream requires:

707 ÷ 8 × 1.25 = 110.5 MB/s

Four simultaneous UHD 4K ProRes 422 HQ streams require:

707 ÷ 8 × 4 × 1.25 = 442 MB/s

The first example fits comfortably within a healthy 1GbE connection. A single ProRes 422 HQ stream sits right at the practical ceiling of 1GbE, leaving no margin for anything else on the link. The four-camera example needs 10GbE.

Codec complexity matters separately from bandwidth. Highly compressed H.264 or HEVC footage can have a modest bitrate and still stutter because the workstation is struggling to decode it. If the same timeline drops frames when the media is on a local SSD, upgrading the NAS network will not solve the problem. Use proxies, optimized media, or a workstation with stronger hardware decoding.

What Your Network and Drives Actually Supply

The NAS port is only one part of the path. A 10GbE NAS connected to a 1GbE switch operates at 1GbE, and the same limitation applies when the workstation has only a 1GbE adapter. Cable category, switch capability, and background traffic all sit in the same chain.

Storage

Putting demand and supply together

Four ProRes 422 HQ angles need 442 MB/s. Four HDDs in RAID 5 supply roughly 600 to 700 MB/s, so a four-bay array over 10GbE handles that timeline with margin to spare.

The same four angles in ProRes 4444 need 663 MB/s. That sits at the very top of what a four-drive array delivers, which means any fill level, background task, or second editor pushes it over. Six bays or a dedicated SSD pool is the safer specification.

This is the calculation to run before comparing models, because it determines which of the configurations below you actually need.

Choosing the Right NAS for Your Workflow

You edit on a local SSD and archive projects to the NAS

This workflow keeps active footage, cache files, and previews on the workstation’s internal SSD. The NAS holds camera-original backups, completed projects, proxies, shared assets, and exports.

The UGREEN NASync DXP2800 is a practical starting point. It has two SATA bays, two M.2 slots, and a 2.5GbE connection. Two matched drives in RAID 1 keep the storage available if one drive fails.

{{UGPRODUCT}}

Use this configuration when:

• One person does most of the editing.
• Current projects fit on the workstation SSD.
• The NAS primarily handles backup, archive, and file sharing.
• You occasionally open lightweight media or proxies over the network.

A two-bay RAID 1 pool supplies 200 to 300 MB/s. That covers proxies and single-stream work, and it is poorly suited to several editors pulling high-bitrate media at the same time.

You edit full-resolution media directly from the NAS

Direct editing removes the need to copy each project to the workstation before starting. It also makes the same media library available from multiple editing systems. The network and storage pool must sustain the footage bitrate throughout playback, scrubbing, and multicamera work.

The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT provides four SATA bays, two M.2 slots, and two 10GbE ports. Its M.2 drives can serve as cache or a separate SSD storage pool. Bays 1 and 2 also support compatible U.2 SSDs in place of SATA drives.

{{UGPRODUCT}}

A useful layout is:

• HDD RAID for camera originals, completed projects, and bulk capacity
• SSD storage pool for current projects that need low latency
• Local workstation SSD for media cache and temporary renders
• 10GbE between the NAS and editing workstation

The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus remains a strong general-purpose option for a solo creator who needs one 10GbE editing workstation and additional 2.5GbE connectivity. Direct network editing specifically favors the DXP4800 GT because it provides two 10GbE ports and additional U.2 storage options.

The GT’s two 10GbE ports can increase aggregate bandwidth across several clients when the network supports link aggregation. They do not give one workstation a 20Gbps connection through a single cable. There is one exception: SMB Multichannel can use two network paths for the same client without switch-side aggregation, so a workstation with two 10GbE interfaces can exceed a single link to a NAS that also has two.

Several editors share the same media

A small post-production team needs more than a fast Ethernet port. The storage pool must maintain sufficient throughput while several people play, import, render, or export media concurrently.

The UGREEN NASync DXP6800 Pro has six SATA bays, two M.2 slots, and two 10GbE ports. Six drives in RAID 5 supply 900 MB/s and above, which is the difference between comfortably serving two ProRes 4444 editors and running out of headroom mid-session.

This setup fits teams that:

• Keep shared camera originals and graphics on the NAS.
• Need two or more editors to access media simultaneously.
• Work with multicamera projects or high-bitrate intermediate codecs.
• Want separate active, archive, and backup storage roles.

The NAS supplies shared storage. Your editing software still controls project collaboration, file locking, databases, and conflict prevention. Two editors opening the same standalone project file can overwrite each other even when the media itself is stored correctly.

Give each editing workstation an appropriate network path. Connecting the NAS at 10GbE accomplishes little if every workstation reaches it through 1GbE.

Your editors work remotely

A 40Mbps upload provides a theoretical maximum of 5 MB/s before protocol overhead. At that rate, transferring a 100GB project takes at least 5.6 hours. Full-resolution remote editing becomes unreliable long before a local 10GbE NAS reaches its limit.

Remote teams generally need one of these workflows:

• Generate proxies on-site and synchronize the smaller files.
• Keep full-resolution media on the NAS and use remote desktop software to control an editing workstation on the same local network.
• Transfer selected project folders before editing instead of mounting the entire library remotely.
• Use the NAS as the central media source while a dedicated collaboration platform manages project data.

Size the NAS for the editors and applications working on the studio network. Then design the remote workflow around available upload speed. Our guide to setting up a 4K NAS editing workflow covers proxy and storage planning in more detail.

If your workflow falls between these examples, browse and filter NAS storage models by bay count, network ports, processor, and supported storage configuration.

Configuring Drives, RAID, and Protocols

Once the model is chosen, three configuration decisions determine whether it performs as calculated.

Use HDDs for capacity and SSDs for active work

Hard drives provide a lower cost per terabyte for camera originals, archives, exports, and completed projects. SSDs provide lower latency and higher random-access performance for active projects.

A practical tiered configuration can include:

• HDD storage pool for originals and archive
• M.2 or SATA SSD storage pool for current projects
• Local NVMe SSD for media cache, preview files, and temporary renders
• Separate backup destination for recovery

SSD cache and an SSD storage pool are not interchangeable, and for editing the distinction decides which to configure. Cache accelerates data that is read repeatedly from another pool. Editing rarely produces that pattern, because scrubbing a timeline touches the whole file rather than a small hot subset, so a read cache is often bypassed for exactly the work you wanted it to accelerate. A dedicated SSD pool stores the project files themselves and performs predictably regardless of access pattern. For active editing, choose the pool.

Before combining storage types, review how to use SSD and HDD storage tiers in a NAS.

Select RAID around throughput, rebuilds, and downtime

RAID 5 uses the equivalent capacity of one drive for parity and survives one drive failure. It provides more usable capacity than RAID 10 with the same number of equal-size drives. During a rebuild the array has no remaining fault tolerance, and rebuilding large drives can take many hours or days.

RAID 10 requires at least four drives and provides 50 percent of raw capacity. It avoids parity calculation, reads faster than RAID 5 by roughly 100 MB/s on a four-drive array, and rebuilds by copying from a mirror partner rather than recalculating across every member. For an editing array where a rebuild during a deadline is the worst case, that difference matters more than the lost capacity.

RAID 6 survives two drive failures but spends two drives on parity, and its write penalty makes it a poor fit for most four-drive editing configurations. It becomes relevant on six-bay and larger arrays.

Never use RAID 0 for the only copy of a project. One failed member destroys the entire array.

Use matched CMR NAS drives and confirm the exact model in the UGREEN NAS compatibility list before ordering. RAID keeps the system available through drive failures and does not recover a project deleted by mistake, corrupted by software, or encrypted by ransomware, so keep an independent backup and a UPS.

Choose the file-sharing protocol

Use SMB3 as the default for Windows, macOS, and mixed-platform shared editing. Adobe recommends SMB for Premiere Pro Productions on shared storage, and SMB3 is what enables Multichannel.

NFS can fit an established Linux or macOS workflow when the editing application and permissions are already configured for it.

iSCSI presents network storage to the workstation as a block device. Use it when a specific application or storage design requires block-level access. It is not a simple replacement for shared SMB folders, and multiple workstations cannot safely mount and write to the same ordinary filesystem without a storage design that supports concurrent block access.

Jumbo frames are optional. They can reduce packet-processing overhead during large sequential transfers, but every device in the path must use a compatible MTU. Leave the network at the standard 1500-byte MTU when the NAS, workstation, switch, and intermediate links cannot all be configured and verified together. Cisco’s jumbo-frame guidance likewise treats them as optional and emphasizes consistent end-to-end configuration.

Final Recommendations

Test:

1. Playback from the NAS at full resolution.
2. Scrubbing and jumping between timeline positions.
3. Multicamera playback with the normal number of angles.
4. Simultaneous access by one editor, then by the expected team.
5. Import, rendering, relinking, and export operations.
6. Recovery of a deleted test file from your independent backup.

Watch sustained read speed, dropped frames, application warnings, and workstation CPU and GPU load. Change one variable at a time if the test fails. Generate proxies, move cache files locally, use an SSD pool, upgrade the network path, or reduce concurrent load before replacing the entire NAS.