LAN photo and video editing speeds

I am happy with my current FreeNAS setup running 9.2.1.6 on a 3.1ghz i3 with 16GB ram and 8x 2TB drives. However, after speed testing my FreeNAS, which is mostly used for media storage, I found it was 4-5x faster than my locally-attached drives I used for photo and video editing! Now I am wondering how I can optimize a separate share for the fastest always-on read-write speeds used in video and photo editing.

A quick overview of my setup.

I am...

LAN photo and video editing speeds