I have 2 clients with a similar problem. Each are artist foundations, each about to receive a large volume of digitized video, audio and photography. A portion will be managed by FileMaker, and a portion will simply be stored in a traditional file sharing environment. Neither client can estimate what portion of the 20+TB of expected data will be managed by FileMaker and which by file server. One option is to simply get large RAIDS for both the file server and FileMaker Server, but we were hoping for a more economical and fungible approach to storage. Expandable network storage used by both systems would be ideal conceptually and financially. I understand remotely stored containers are possible now. (FMS16 setup guide says "If you set up additional database or container data folders on remote volumes, the account must also have full permissions to access these remote folders. ") But I have some concerns...

1. Is this approach even advisable from a performance point of view?
2. Must the database reside on the same remote external volume as the containers?
3. Does anyone have a setup like this in the wild?

#1: not advisable if it is NAS, SAN is supported.  NAS is bad because of the fragility and performance issues with substituting disk i/o for network i/o

#2: no, you can specify a non-default folder for the file and that will enable the option to choose an additional folder for the RC data.

Under no circumstances can the RC data folders be exposed to anything but FMS; no other process or sharing can be allowed to touch it; you have to treat them like the live FM files that they are.  In that sense the RC feature is NOT a document management feature; it is strictly a storage and backup efficiency feature.

Thank you Wim. And thank you for emphasizing the need to keep this directory restricted to FMS use–I was surprised that this configuration is now supported since these files should never be touched by anything but the FMS.