juicemount · blog
Blog
Every number on these pages is measured and attributed, or dated and sourced.
Comparisons, guides, and field notes from building an open-source streaming mount for video editors. Hand-written pages, an Atom feed, no tracker.
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The best storage appliances for creatives in 2026
A sourced tour of the boxes a small post team actually buys, with the catch on each. First, the thing no vendor leads with: this year the drives cost more than the appliance.
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The privacy cost of cloud AI search
Search-by-meaning is the headline feature of creative storage in 2026, and it works by sending your footage somewhere else. What Frame.io, Shade, iconik, and LucidLink upload, who ends up holding a copy, and the facial-recognition question.
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LucidLink in 2026: the real bill
LucidLink invented the workflow and earned an Emmy for it. The headline price is $7; the number that lands on a media team is not. A line-by-line teardown: a 5-seat, 10 TB team works out near $9,300 a year before egress.
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LucidLink alternatives in 2026, including the one we built
We build one of the options, so it gets the harshest paragraph on the page; every price carries its checked date and every source is listed.
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Why your NAS feels slow over a VPN (it's not your bandwidth)
The speed test says the line is fine and the share still crawls: a worked minute of editing shows the tax is round trips times latency, and bandwidth barely touches it.
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Your bytes are your bytes: what leaving actually costs
The monthly meter is on the pricing page; the exit meter is the one that tells you who owns the library, so here it is, read in public at 20 TB.
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SuiteStudios reviewed in 2026: managed vs BYO, onsite caching, the year-one cost
A fair review of SuiteStudios: Managed at 75 dollars per TB with zero egress versus BYO at 40 dollars per TB, the onsite cache, and what a 5-seat 20 TB team pays in year one.
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Shade reviewed in 2026: ShadeFS, AI tagging, and where it bills
An honest founder's review of Shade in 2026: the ShadeFS mount and AI search that genuinely work, and the per-seat price, 15-seat cap, and S3 lock-in that bite.
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iconik reviewed in 2026: MAM plus Storage Gateway, and where the costs hide
iconik bills on three meters at once: active users, AI and automation credits, and proxy plus transfer overhead. A 2026 cost teardown of the MAM and its Storage Gateway.
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Strada reviewed in 2026: the new entrant, what it does, what it costs
An honest look at Strada in 2026: peer-to-peer remote editing, the cloud AI tagging story, company maturity, and the per-seat pricing catch.
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Dropbox and Google Drive for video teams: why good enough stops scaling
Why general cloud sync works for small projects and breaks for real media teams: conflicted copies, scrubbing lag, and the per-seat cost curve.
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Backblaze B2 vs Wasabi vs plain S3 as a media backend in 2026
B2, Wasabi, and S3 priced as media backends: the per-TB math, egress fees, and minimum-storage windows that decide your real bill.
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Frame.io as storage and review in 2026: scope, limits, and what it is not
Frame.io V4 added real mounted storage, but the Drive caps run 250GB to 2TB and the pricing is per seat: here is where it shines and where a NAS still wins.
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JuiceMount vs the SaaS suites: the lane each one owns
Suite, Shade, iconik, and a self-hosted mount each win a different job; an honest map of which lane each owns and who should pick which, prices checked June 2026.
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Self-hosted sync (Resilio, Syncthing, Nextcloud) vs a real mount
Resilio, Syncthing, and Nextcloud copy whole files; a streaming mount fetches only the bytes an editor reads, and that gap shows up as disk, scrubbing, and conflict failures.
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AI search in creative storage, explained: what it indexes, where it runs, what it costs
A plain-language look at how AI search works across creative storage: the three things it indexes, where processing runs, and the per-minute versus per-seat cost models.
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How to use LucidLink's AI features in 2026 (and the privacy footprint)
LucidLink AI search is really the Moments Lab MXT-2 integration. How it works, how to enable it, what it costs across both vendors, and its privacy footprint.
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How to use Shade's AI tagging and semantic search
A practical guide to Shade AI: auto-tagging, plain-English semantic search, face clustering, and the setup choices that decide whether you get great results or junk.
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iconik AI: auto-tagging, face recognition, and transcription
How iconik AI tagging, face recognition, and transcription work, which engines run them, and where the proxy-and-audio credit cost actually lands.
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Facial Recognition in Creative Tools: Useful, or a Liability?
When face clustering genuinely saves video editors time versus when it becomes a consent and confidentiality liability, with honest tradeoffs and 2026 numbers.
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Does AI search actually save editors time? An honest, measured look
A grounded look at where AI search saves editors real time and where the payoff is overstated, with vendor numbers read honestly and a payoff-by-scenario table.
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Local vs cloud AI indexing: the real tradeoffs
The local-versus-cloud AI indexing fork decides your privacy, your bill, and your feature ceiling. A sourced 2026 field guide to which side suits you.
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AI features and client confidentiality: NDAs, embargoed footage, and who can see it
How cloud AI tagging and search add a third party to your NDA trust boundary, and how to keep embargoed footage on the right side of your contracts.
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The true cost of AI add-ons across the major platforms, priced for 2026
A priced, dated 2026 look at what transcription, tagging, and semantic search cost across iconik, Shade, Frame.io, and LucidLink, plus the wholesale engine rates underneath.
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TrueNAS for video editing in 2026: a practical guide
A practical 2026 guide to TrueNAS Community Edition for editing: ECC RAM, ZFS pool layout, the SSD-vs-HDD call, 10 GbE bandwidth math, and a real mount.
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Synology for post-production in 2026: where it shines, where it stalls
After the 2025 drive saga and DSM 7.3: the 2.5GbE network ceiling, the M.2 NVMe lock-in caveat, and exactly when a Synology fits a video editing workflow.
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QNAP for creatives in 2026: Thunderbolt, ZFS, and the catch
QNAP's Thunderbolt 4 boxes, QuTS hero ZFS, the real transfer speeds and 2026 prices, and the software-surface catch a creative team has to plan around.
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Unraid for media in 2026: flexibility vs performance
Unraid is great for a mixed-drive media library and rough for editing off the array itself: the parity write tax, NVMe cache pools, 2026 license tiers, and drive-price math.
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Build vs buy: a NAS for a small post house in 2026
The build-versus-buy NAS call for a small post house in 2026, with reference parts, real prices, and the year-one bill both ways.
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All-NVMe SSD storage appliance: worth it for editing, or overkill in 2026?
Whether an all-NVMe NAS is worth it for editing in a flash-shortage year, with the 2026 cost-per-TB and where the speed actually helps.
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HDD vs SSD vs hybrid for media libraries: the 2026 cost and performance math
The 2026 cost-per-TB and performance math for HDD, SSD, and hybrid media storage, with sourced prices and a worked 40 TB build example.
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Keeping storage costs down as drive prices rise in 2026
HDDs sold out and NAND doubled in 2026. Six tactics to keep storage costs down during the surge, with the per-TB numbers behind each.
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Sizing your SSD cache: how much do you actually need for editing?
Size an editing SSD cache to your working set, not your library: a simple method using codec data rates, hit rates, and 2026 SSD prices.
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ZFS for video editors, explained plainly
A plain-English guide to ZFS for video editors: how it protects footage, what pools and vdevs are, RAIDZ vs mirrors, and the recordsize and cache settings worth changing.
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Cold storage and archive tiers for finished projects in 2026
LTO tape vs cold cloud vs cheap HDD for archiving delivered projects, with 2026 prices, the retrieval costs that bite, and a tiering plan.
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Best routers for network video editing in 2026
Editing off a NAS rarely routes media through the router; the switch carries it. The 2026 multi-gig router picks, prices, and where the bottleneck really sits.
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Best switches for a post studio in 2026: 2.5, 10, and 25 GbE
Named 2.5, 10, and 25 GbE switches for a post studio with real per-port prices, and the codec math that tells you which tier you actually need.
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10 GbE on a budget in 2026: NICs, cables, and switches that actually work
A budget 10 GbE setup for editors: which used NICs, which cables (DAC, fiber, or copper), and which switches deliver real throughput without overspending.
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Thunderbolt vs 10 GbE for editors: direct-attach vs networked
Direct-attach Thunderbolt speed vs networked 10 GbE sharing for editors, with real 2026 numbers on throughput, streams, distance, and which to choose.
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Wi-Fi vs wired for editing off a NAS (and when Wi-Fi is fine)
Wire the seat that scrubs raw 4K and stop apologizing for Wi-Fi on the seat that edits proxies, with the codec throughput and jitter numbers that decide which is which.
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Diagnosing slow NAS performance: an editor's checklist
A layer-by-layer checklist to find why a NAS feels slow for editing: link, protocol, drives, cache, and client.
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VPN vs mesh (Tailscale, WireGuard) for remote editing in 2026
Traditional hub-and-spoke VPNs versus mesh networks like Tailscale and WireGuard for reaching a NAS remotely, with 2026 prices and benchmarks, and why latency still rules editing.
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A network reference build for a 2 to 5 person post team
A concrete reference network for a small post team: which switch and NICs to buy, what cable goes where, and the one 10 GbE link you must not starve.
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What happened to EditShare? The decades-long player and its 2026 stack
From a 2004 NAS upstart to a consolidated 2026 stack: the ParkerGale and Shift Media deals, EFS, FLOW, MediaSilo, and where EditShare fits now.
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What happened to Avid shared storage (ISIS and Nexis)?
From Unity to ISIS to NEXIS: the arc of Avid shared storage, where it stands in 2026, and why broadcast newsrooms still rely on it.
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Facilis, OpenDrives, and the enterprise media-storage old guard in 2026
Who still buys Facilis HUB and OpenDrives Atlas in 2026, what they actually ship, and where the architecture they pioneered is now affordable elsewhere.
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From SAN to cloud and back: a short history of shared storage for post
A short, sourced history of post-production shared storage, from 1999 fibre SANs through Ethernet and the cloud to the 2026 on-prem comeback.
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Why on-prem storage is having a moment again: the cloud-cost backlash
Egress fees, per-seat fatigue, and a tight 2026 drive market are pushing creative teams to repatriate storage, and here is where the math holds and where the cloud still wins.
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What a real mount means for editors, and why it matters
What it means for storage to mount as a real Finder volume, and why that beats an app or a sync folder for video editing.
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Block-level streaming vs whole-file sync, explained with one analogy
A single clear analogy for block streaming vs sync, the trap in the word block, and why it decides how editing off a NAS feels.
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Open source vs SaaS for creative infrastructure: ownership, exit, and cost
The ownership, exit, and cost case for open-source creative infrastructure versus SaaS in 2026, argued fairly both ways with real numbers.
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A glossary of storage terms every editor should know
A plain-English glossary of the storage and networking terms editors keep hitting, from NAS and SAN to ZFS, cache, and egress, each with a real 2026 number.