Best NAS Storage for Post-Production Teams in 2025
Choosing the right NAS for a post-production environment is more nuanced than specs alone. We break down the top options for small and mid-size studios in Los Angeles.
Why NAS Storage Matters in Post-Production
Post-production is a bandwidth-intensive environment. A single 4K ProRes 4444 clip can clock in at 2 to 3 GB per minute. Multiply that across a team of editors, colorists, and VFX artists working simultaneously, and the demands on shared storage become immense.
A NAS (Network Attached Storage) device sits at the center of your collaborative workflow, serving media to edit workstations, accepting renders, and storing archives. The wrong choice creates bottlenecks, corrupts projects, or simply can't scale with your team.
What to Look For
Throughput, not just capacity. Specs will advertise drive capacity, but the number that matters is aggregate read/write throughput to your network. For a small editorial team sharing a single 10GbE connection, you want a NAS that can saturate that link, roughly 1,000 MB/s.
RAID configuration. For active project storage, RAID 6 provides resilience against two simultaneous drive failures. Avoid RAID 5 for large arrays. The rebuild times after a failure can be catastrophic with large modern drives.
Hot-swap drive bays. Drive failures happen. Hot-swap bays let you replace a failed drive without taking the system offline.
10GbE or faster. A NAS connected over 1GbE caps throughput at around 125 MB/s, which is not enough for uncompressed 4K. 10GbE is the minimum standard for a modern post-production NAS.
Top Options for Creative Studios
QNAP TVS-h874
One of QNAP's strongest prosumer NAS units, the TVS-h874 runs a full ZFS-based operating system (QuTS hero) on Intel Xeon-class hardware. Key specs:
Best for: Studios of 4 to 10 editors who need reliability and flexibility. QuTS hero's ZFS foundation provides data integrity guarantees you don't get from consumer NAS systems.
Synology DS1823xs+
Synology's prosumer flagship combines excellent software with a capable hardware platform. The DS1823xs+ offers:
Best for: Studios that want ease of use and excellent ecosystem integration. Synology's Active Directory integration and user permission management are top-tier.
EditShare EVO
EditShare is purpose-built for broadcast and post-production workflows. Unlike QNAP and Synology (general-purpose NAS), EditShare EVO was designed from the ground up for media workflows:
Best for: Studios doing broadcast deliverables or needing Avid integration. Higher cost than QNAP/Synology but purpose-built for the workflow.
TrueNAS SCALE (DIY)
For studios with in-house IT expertise (or a consulting partner), TrueNAS SCALE on custom hardware offers the highest throughput per dollar. An enterprise-grade server platform with TrueNAS SCALE can deliver 4+ GB/s throughput with 25GbE networking.
Best for: Larger studios with 15+ editors and an IT partner who can support it. Not recommended for studios without dedicated IT.
Network Configuration
A NAS is only as fast as its network. For a studio running a 10GbE NAS:
Capacity Planning
A rough guide for active project storage:
Plan for 3 to 6 months of active project storage at peak capacity, plus 20% headroom for OS and cache. Archive older projects to LTO tape or cold cloud storage (AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive runs roughly $1/TB/month).
Clouds Agency designs and implements NAS storage systems for post-production studios across Los Angeles. Contact us to discuss your storage needs.
Written by the team at Clouds Agency, a Los Angeles creative and production consulting agency.