Best way to network 3 Protools Suites?

[SOUNDDECISION]

I need to set up 3 Protools rigs on Mac OS (most likely Catalina) in the same facility but want to have them networked to a 4th station that serves as a hub and has all the hard drives where all the files reside for all the rooms. Id like any project to be available to any of the rooms and handle all the backups from that 4th computer. Does anyone have recommendations on the easiest way to do this? Also the most cost effective way. It won't be massive amounts of data as its not a post production set up but a fair amount as it is for music production.

Would it be as simple as just having everyone access the drives with the 4th computer connected through the network? Will access be fast enough? Or is there some other software or drive configurations I'll need?

Thanks!

[falcowe]

I unfortunately don't have a solution for you. However I have tinkered around with my personal rig and running projects off of an unRAID server with HDDs as the storage medium. And even as a single user I was having issues where ProTools would freeze up and become unresponsive for 10s or so before whatever data it was fetching was buffered and it could operate again.

More recently I have tried trowing an SSD on a dedicated share from the unRAID server and have had good luck with playing back a project off of that. However I haven't done more than that with the SSD on unRAID. And I suspect I would continue to have issues if I tired to do any sort of editing, or recording with the drive hosted by unRAID rather than locally attached. And I suspect this because the file system overhead plus network overhead causing just enough latency that it doesn't play nice with ProTools. But do take this with about an ocean worth of salt as I have NOT really tested this. More just dabbled.

And finally this really won't tell you much about your use case with hosting on OSX, but I suspect you'll have similar file system overhead as I do on unRAID since OSX isn't meant to be a file host, and (I suspect) not writing in such a way to be efficient at acting as a NAS.