My first NAS - are these sensible choices?

Thats a good choice. I would go for 2tb drives as the space soon starts to get eaten up. I bought mine thinking similar to you in terms of my cd collection. Now I have photos and home video stored too, and can stream to my sony bluray player too to make photos and videos viewable on tv. Its a fantastic device that is so versatile, so I wouldnt limit yourself to 1tb.

+1 on 2TB disk size

& +2 for Synology

In summary, +3 from me.

You'll have to decide how you want to format the hard drives.  The Synology, by default, will recommend a RAID set-up.  I went along with that, but to be honest I'm not so sure I'm getting much benefit from it.

WD Red drives are what you want.  2tb is so close in price to 1tb that it'd be silly to stop at 1.

+ for the bigger disk size and I have a Synology NAS and I'm very happy with it.

Synology sets up a Raid with the disks so if one disk fails (as mine did a week or so ago), all your music is still there on the other.

I have two 4TB disks and I set the Synology up to make them into a Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR).  The two 4TB disks in SHR gives you 4TB of space.  In your case, two 1 TB disks gives you 1TB of space.

So one of my 4TB hard drives crashes completely and I can still access and play all my music stored on the NAS.  I sent the broken disk back, got a replacement and all I had to do was stick it in the NAS and the Synology automatically makes it into a SHR again.  So I have redundancy once again should a disk ever fail.

My Syno is a two disk affair so I elected to buy a 5 disk expansion unit that plugs into the 2 disk unit.

On my particular Syno, the DS213+ the expansion could only be a separate save place and not part of the SHR on the DS213+ but I'm cool with that.  I just wanted another back up to save me ever having to rip well over 1,000 CD's again.

I cannot recommend any nas for itunes use unless you are going to run an itunes server (DAAP) from that nas.

If this is your 'first foray' then you should be aware that itunes and NASes arn't a great mix. Infact iTunes and anything else is not a good mix. You could consider ditching itunes.

Can't agree with the above. I've run iTunes from a Mac/PC for years with the library on a NAS drive without problem. It also happily shares with Sonos and now Minimserver for the Naim. 

Another plus for 2TB drives, mirroring and as much RAM as you can get. 

Judge

The Synology DS215j looks a good budget choice if you are looking for a dual disk NAS. I see it has 512MB of RAM which will be more than adequate unless you're looking at multi-usage, etc. and is the same as my QNAP NAS. Also, I would stick with WD Reds for the HDs.

Regarding HD size I find 1TB is more than adequate for my needs. I am storing about 250GB of music files, approx. 550 albums of mainly ALACs, and about 50GB of photo files. Although on my home network the NAS is really dedicated to music streaming as I also have USB storage for PC file backup (hence the music and photo files are stored in 3 locations).

In your final choice of NAS you may want to consider the apps you intend to run on it. I choose QNAP in the end because I use Logitech Media Server (LMS). You don't say how you are planning to stream your files? Will it be from a computer or a dedicated steamer?

Dave

Starting with two small disks then 'upgrading' to two bigger ones isn't really the cost effective solution imo.

What will you do with your first two disks in the event you choose to buy two larger ones in the future?

There's a big difference between running iTunes on a Mac with the library on a nas vs. running an iTunes server on a nas.

Surely the question the OP needs to consider is what his current storage space requirements are and what they are likely to be in the future. For me 4TB would be totally over the top.

Dave

Also, one or two posts have said get as much RAM as you can afford, or similar words to that effect. Exactly what does that mean? A 1.6GHz processor and 512MB of DRAM seems perfectly adequate for my needs.

Dave

We almost always underestimate what future needs will be.  I like to find the sweet spot for price / performance / storage capacity.  Today, 2 or 3 TB WD Red drives hit the sweet spot for me.  

If I were into loading blu-ray videos onto a nas and streaming them, many multiples of that would be needed I'm sure.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.  I think I'll go for 2TB drives, since that will allow some expansion with other media.  It was my intention to run them in whichever RAID mode creates a mirror copy, so that if a drive failed, hopefully all would not be lost.  

I don't understand the comment about iTunes. Perhaps it would be more accurate for me to express it as the storage location that is used by iTunes (music and audio books) for loading my iPod.  

If you are going Synology DS215, I think you will find it comes with RAID 1 (mirror) ready to go.

But irrespective of whatever RAID you have - BACK-UP to another NAS or USB

Could not agree more with Mike-B,  a raid set to mirrored provides for resilience but does not protect from finger trouble.. A weekly sync to external copy gives protection, then nas may even have built in external copy backup function which then does it for you at a suitable time

No-one mentioned Netgear Readynas -  a good, quiet product with extensive backup facilities on top of its RAID capabilities and disk upgrage capability with X-RAID.

You'd be misguided to go for anything less than 2TB drives, IMHO, and of course the WD Red drives are the ones to use because they are built for server (NAS) duties.

Readynas also comes with its own server app* which will distribute the music from the folders you select to the whole of your network, including Naim streamers, of course. 

(* - someone's going to tell me which app it actually is)

Overall summary - NAS IS definately the way forward 

Given the recent advice to backup with an external HD, I can't see the point in buying a 2 bay NAS.

Buy a single bay NAS and 2 x 1TB hard drives, one for the NAS the other for external back up. In the future if you need a 2TB drive, you only need to buy 1 x 2TB drive, the 2 x 1TB hard drives can be used for back up. Also, by the time you upgrade to 2TB they'll be as cheap as a 1TB drive cost today. Do the maths.

Or, as above but start off with 2 x 2TB drives.

I have a single bay NAS/2TB drive, had it 3 years, it contains 500 albums and is only 30% full. It's backed up with a 1TB drive.

The main thing to sort if you want to stream your itunes library to other devices is that the NAS you choose runs a version of itunes server.

I've been running 2 x 2TB buffalo linkstation NAS drives for nearly a year now with my itunes library on them. (2nd drive is for backup)

The drives have an inbuilt itunes server so its been a very simple process to stream my music to various devices without any hassle at all, in fact it runs as smooth as silk serving the UQ2 even at the highest 24 bit resolution supported by the UQ2.

I too have been in the process of replacing my files with ALAC versions/rips were possible and couldn't be happier with the results and the system I have.

As mentioned don't skimp on the size of drives, go for the largest you can afford as they soon fill up,  my own are currently just over 60% full so I will probably have to think about larger drives later in the year.

Finally itunes is a very capable beast once you've learned to tame it and use its features to your advantage, I feel no need to change at all.

I have a QNAP 419PII with 4 x 2TB drives (Seagate) using RAID 6

I have a library now exceeding 48,000 pieces of music.

My preferred server is Asset - NAS based (rather than the PC based version).

It works fine with 512MB RAM ... provided I don't try playing around with the tags, or moving/adding tracks.  If so, I've found that the RAM usage shoots up to 90% + and the music suddenly stops.

I can't upgrade the RAM on this QNAP model and wish I'd known about this issue before buying.

Take it form me: if you have a large-ish library you need the extra RAM!

I queried this problem on the Asset forum and was told that 512MB is not much RAM for such a library.

Mitch

Synology caution against too much RAM with their "Business" multi disk NAS units that can up-size RAM cards.  These typically have 1 to 2MB RAM working with a lot of TB HDD

With typical home Audio/AV/photo 2 bay units they say 512mb is correct with the design max of 10TB

"It works fine with 512MB RAM ... provided I don't try playing around with the tags, or moving/adding tracks.  If so, I've found that the RAM usage shoots up to 90% + and the music suddenly stops."

Hi Mitch...That's interesting, have a peep at my post, 'NAS threw a wobbly'. On the 2nd page.

Been using one of these for nearly a year now. Totally rock solid. Hosts my iTunes library, also presented via UPnP using Minimserver. Added benefit of being silent in operation.

http://www.qnap.com/i/uk/product/model.php?II=118

Connected a USB3 WD Password 2TB for some extra flexablity with Elephant drive cloud backup. 

Highly recommended.

I would say you have a very large music library! Approx. x10 the size of mine. Personally I find it more convenient to make tagging changes, etc. to my PC stored files and then copy to the NAS.

Dave

I agree with Rjstaines above, the Netgear devives are reliable and affordable.

My word of advice though.. a NAS is a network attached storage device. These devices are not optimised as application servers.. Yes they can run a few basic apps, but these don't require much prcessing power or memory... If you want to run many apps, get a mini server designed for the task that has the security and optimized operating system to support a server... Best let your NAS remain a NAS. By doing that the chances are you will have great reliability. In all the years I have run my Netgear NAS's I have not once had an issue.. But I don't run apps on them other than basic admin and monitoring apps.

Agree with Mike about backing up your NAS.. My main NAS automatically backs up once a week, and emails me all is ok.. I also run an history/undue capability on my main NAS to quickly remedy many finger trouble issues.

Finally, recommend a UPS for main and backup NAS.. And I have had a power cut midway through a backup before now and the UPS allowed the backup to conclude safely and then safely shutdown both devices (according to the logs). Without UPS, both prime and backup could possibly have become  scrambled.

Simon