New NAS recommendation

1) Either is excellent. QNAP will run Asset UPNP and either will run Minim, if that makes a difference.

2) No to Raid (other views are available). 

3) Yes and no - you can stick a WD Red in and the other disk size doesn't have to match.

4) You must back up properly. There are lots of options, eg cloud, another NAS, another computer, external HD. The last is probably cheapest, a NAS is probably simplest. It isn't quick to back-up 10TB (!), so factor that in. Of course, you only have to back up the disk space you're actually using, not necessarily the whole 10TB (which is huge - how many albums do you have?)

Thanks Solid Air most helpful.

11, 239 CDs in the collection - almost finished ripping them - taken me four years!

I own a qnap and a synology; both seem just fine.  The qnap "silent" HS-251 is pretty nice; all I hear is the faint 'clunking' of the hdd's.  The UI's are similar, and honestly I don't prefer one over the other.

Ansy

have QNAP HS 210 running asset which is great and silent, but either is good 

In relation to question 4 if you are using a new NAS as your primary why not repurpose the old PC based NAS as a backup. Depending on your IT skills and the capacity of your PC based NAS it may be a simple task to just add any extra storage required and use the PC Based NAS as your local backup. You can then use the external drives for off-site backups. I use 2 NAS's myself to provide primary source and local backup for most of my data and find it works well.

A word of caution, since no-one else has mentioned it yet...  it is usual for a NAS drive, upon discovering an'alien' hard drive plonked in its receptacles, to format this new drive, discarding whatever was on there before.

So if you have nearly 6gb of stuff, you'll want to make doubly sure your backup of it is both valid, up to date and readable !!  because chances are this is where you're going to have to populate your new QNAP or SYNOLOGY from initially.

If anyone knows differently about the behaviour of these two NAS's with pre-populated disks, please mention it, but for now, exercise caution Andy  

Roger 

"So if you have nearly 6gb of stuff,"  ...and if you have nearly 6 terrabytes of stuff, it's even more important.

Coming from an age when 650 kilobytes was thought to be all that anyone could ever want, the leap from kilo to mega to giga to terra thingy's sometimes gets confusing.  Thank God I'm retired and no longer have to place orders for computer equipment... can you imagine getting my terra's mixed up with my giga's ?

AndyP19 posted:

Thanks Solid Air most helpful.

11, 239 CDs in the collection - almost finished ripping them - taken me four years!

Wow - that is one hellacious collection.  And this is where computer based storage can really shine in terms of cataloguing, finding, etc.

Surprised it's "only" 6 TB! 

Do keep us posted on how it goes.  I am currently on a Vortexbox, but I am planning ahead in my mind on what to do next and how to do it (since it won't last forever and neither will my SBT), so these threads are of great interest to me.

So I gotta ask.  Do you keep the CDs after ripping?   Where?  Does your SO think you're nuts!  (We don't)

Thanks for all your helpful replies

Gregu, in answer to your question current audit stands 11,402 CDs (with a few more coming down the Amazonian River).

Each one is barcode zapped which gives it a number and records the data (Artist, Album, Coverart) on the Music Collector database. I've written a simple macro for an Excel spreadsheet which allows me to plug in the Music Collector reference number which then tells me where the CD is located 'top shelf, case 3, Lounge' so within a few minutes I can track down any CD in the collection.

At the moment I have two walls covered with racking holding around 3,000 CDs (as below) which is a beauty to behold.

For the rest, after ripping, CDs are packed in large plastic boxes, hermetically sealed (well duck taped) then, stored in the loft which is not great. But, one day they'll be all back out on display.

As the great British philosopher John Miles said:-

Music is my first love
and it will be my last
Music of the future and music of the past
to live without my music
it would be impossible to do
in this world of troubles
my music pulls me through!

Andy

Hi, what is your current pc solution, because in my experience you get massively more bang for you buck doing what you have done. the Synology/netgear route unless you buy the top flight models will be utter tripe in terms of response, speed and ability.

For instance if your pc variant has 4 gigs of ram, its already smashed pretty much 90% of the home NAS market.

I'm going to disagree with that Gary,  yes any old PC has better RAM & CPU & it does no harm to have it,  but for home use & more so if the NAS is just used as a music store,  a lot of RAM has very little effect & is not needed.   It's becomes more important in a multi (simultaneous)  user set up such as an office.  

I have first hand experience just this week trying to get data off what is really a terribly underpowered device, I have never experience something work so slowly.

At the end of the day if you want a simple fit and forget solution, then you pay for that but get bobbins hardware. If you are willing to 'have a go' you can achieve the same result with hardware that has head room to breath. The simple act of copying up files to a NAS/Server should be quick quick quick, something with 256 megs of ram in it is frankly crap regardless of its low requirements.

The op needs to state his gear, its essential to understanding his requirement, he has 6 gigs of music on one drive, I wouldnt trust a 6 gig drive with yours so to my mind he wants that lot off onto a proper raid solution, the guy is obviously serious about his music, may as well give it the hardware it deserves, not a 200 quid nas from amazon.

Personally I think that the OP's answer lies somewhere in the middle - not a cheapo 1/2 bay solution but also not a full blown rack mounted server/storage solution. Assuming he buys a NAS with reasonable modern processor and around 4 GB of RAM then that would be sufficient to undertake storage duties. His music collection is what I would call large, certainly much larger than mine, and so he will probably be in the 4 drive bay solution to get his circa 10TB onto RAID (simple mirror). I agree that I would probably use RAID (simple mirror) to save the hassle of loss of access whilst rebuilding if a drive fails. Newer NAS's support hot swap so even simpler if a drive fails. I know it could be done with less disks but larger disks are still quite expensive and 4 x 6 TB disks will give him 12 TB storage space in a simple RAID.

The OP doesn't mention other data storage functions required but assuming he was also only going to use it only for music serving duties (including transcoding on the fly if required) with no more than one or two users accessing concurrently then it could probably also take on those duties as well.  He will of course need to consider additional backup as we are all aware from other posts that RAID is not backup.

I agree that some NAS's are pretty slow when undertaking large file transfers such as initial backup but backup can be set to happen during quite hours and after initial backup will only consist of incrementals unless he wishes to complete a complete backup/rebuild for some reason. Also using wired connectivity (Ethernet, USB3 or the like) is better than wireless.

As mentioned earlier by others both Synology and QNAP produce NAS's like that described above but they do cost more than £200. If the above is what Garyi was intending then apologies in advance.

garyi posted:

I have first hand experience just this week trying to get data off what is really a terribly underpowered device, I have never experience something work so slowly.

I'm not doubting what you are experiencing Gary.   My experience is different,  I'm playing from a Synology DS214 with a dual core 1.066GHz CPU & 512MB Memory.   Playing a 24/192 WAV,  the CPU is cycling around 10%  & RAM 17%      

Copying up files is another matter,  I get around 10-11mb/s over ethernet,  but if thats slow I'm not bothered,  a few new albums a month is neither here nor there.  What is your idea of a fast upload ??

my server runs typically 110 down and 55 up.

512 megs is by any modern standard underpowered, if you want to run a fast file system a gig of ram per tb data is minimum requirement.

i purchased a dell t20 new, with stock 4 gig on and three more ram slots, came in at 100 quid with a cash back deal. thats mainly for back up but would be a great music nas solution with freenas or openmediavault on. i had drives knocking about but even if buying new would be around 300.

You say if you want to run a fast file system,  OK that might be so when you are uploading large file sizes on a day to day basis;   but myself & I would guess <95% of the people on this forum are using their NAS for simple basic music replay,  so 512MB & a dual-core processor is certainly sufficient for that & in my case has operating capacity to spare.

I use simple Netgear 2 disk  NASs, have done for many years and never had an issue and they run nice and quiet with adaptive cooling.. but I use my NAS as a NAS and disable all its apps for best performance and reliability. I also use another Netgear NAS as the backup NAS. I use a seperate media server .. currently I use two Pi's one running Asset and the other MinimServer connecting to the same NAS. Each media server sounds different, Asset sounds best to my ears but currently my Asset build doesn't support DSD so I use MinimServer for that. The Naim app is totally at ease with multiple media servers..

Simon

Mike-B posted:

You say if you want to run a fast file system,  OK that might be so when you are uploading large file sizes on a day to day basis;   but myself & I would guess <95% of the people on this forum are using their NAS for simple basic music replay,  so 512MB & a dual-core processor is certainly sufficient for that & in my case has operating capacity to spare.

+1

I run a similar NAS setup and it works completely fine.