Why would you transcode on the NAS? Not what I’m suggesting at all; perf on most NAS is awful for that…

There’s a pretty well understood concept of what a NAS is; this isn’t a complicated philosophical problem.

A very common workflow in motion picture production is to use NAS for storage on a fast network, mount the SMB share, have a script/tool/app that monitors the ingest directory and writes to an output dir.

FWIW the key differentiator between a NAS and other types of network storage is the protocols they use.

If files is the main primitive, it’s a NAS; it’s its blocks it’s considered a SAN.

Sometimes SANs have NAS “heads” for clients that want file access or a block level storage device.