Core storage thoughts

Having just unpacked my shiny new Core, I am faced with some choices about storage. 

Core has an internal tray that slides out the rear and can take a 3.5" HD or 2.5" SSD. The Core comes with a bag with some HD screws in it, so mounting it is the task of a couple of minutes from start to finish. It can use USB, and/or network storage too. 

This lends the obvious question about what storage should I use on Core? Where should it be? What are the upsides and downsides?

As one who has just bought a production core, I thought I'd jot down some notes to help others.

Firstly remember that Core comes with no storage in the box. This is a wise decision by naim because it removes any 3rd party warranty liability from the equation. Wasnt it failure of the Seagate ST277R drives that essentially sank Amstrad computers when they were making significant inroads into the European PC market? Plus I'm pretty sure I can buy a drive more cheaply from Amazon and fit it myself than I could expect from either Naim or its dealers. 

Secondly, it should be clearly understood that Core supports three types of storage. 

1) Internal -- in the HD tray that you can unscrew from the rear

2) rear USB -- you can plug in an external USB drive here

3) network -- typically a NAS drive on the network, or possibly a share on a computer server

You can use one, some or all of these in your chosen setup. Its entirely up to you, your existing infrastructure and how you want to proceed. 

Thirdly, another issue is power consumption.  naim states on the website specifications page:

which is kindof correct, if you view it the right way. Core with no storage (either internal or USB) takes 6.7W when running, <2W when in standby and 0.5W when "off" (hold the power button till the relays click and it turns off)

When running, it can serve to the network. When in standby, it can also serve to the network because it can wake up. When "off" it is "off".

If you have any storage on, or directly attached to the Core (internal or USB), then the storage is powered up when in On mode. This is what you would expect. 

However, this storage is kept running even in network standby mode. On mine, the consumption when "on" is around 16.5W and around 15.5W when in network standby. This has two effects -- the power consumption is almost at full on even when in standby, and (as far as I can tell) the drive is kept spinning 24x7 unless you actually go for the long-hold-relay-clicks full Off mode. 

The reason for keeping the drive spinning is so that Core can respond to network requests when in standby without having to wait for the drive to spin up and initialise which could take some seconds on a slow spinning disc drive. Maybe in the future there can be an option for "I am using an SSD which should get going very quickly so treat me differently" But thats not there today, at least as far as I can tell. 

Storage choices:

There are pros and cons to each storage choice (internal/external/network):

Internal:

Pros: 

A one-stop shop for storage. Its built in, you carry it with you if you move your Core to a friends house. You can put a lot of storage in here (up to 8TB). Set it up as the music store and rips go to this drive. And if your network fails, you still have local storage that you can play out through BNC to a Naim DAC or equivalent, although you have no means of actually controlling this. 

Cons:

There are various noises about "approved" or "blessed" drives. I have been using a Seagate ST6000VN0041 IronWolf 6TB, internal harddisk, 8,9 cm (3,5 inch), 128 MB Cache, 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s in the pre-prod core, and it has worked well. However, it gets hot -- 50-55 degrees C. This is within the acceptable temperature range of the drive, so i am not overly concerned about that, although the drive did start making slight whining noises after a lot of use one evening. The drive tray is plastic and so possibly not the best for heat conduction. The Core itself remains very cool to the tough.

Another downside is that this is a singular device -- you need to have a backup solution in place or risk losing everything if the drive fails. It is tempting to plug in a drive and then forget to run backups. The built in backup routines are, shall we say, somewhat rudimentary and skeletal at the moment, but the need to update a backup archive will be significantly determined by the rate of change of your music store. Make sure you run a backup to an external store every time you have ripped a disc or imported some music via front USB. 

Overall: its an easy solution, but requires thought and care. Reripping everything because the internal drive fails is not an option. 

Rear USB

i have been using the rather lovely Samsung T3 credit card sized USBC 2TB ssd drive hanging off the rear usb socket. Works fine, very portable, very fast. Or you can hang an external USB cage here with a pair of mirrored drives for lots of storage in mirror. 

Pros:

Like Internal, except its easy to detach. You could put a dual drive mirrored USB drive pair here, or even have a hot spare on standby, for example, and thus improve the resilience. 

Cons:

More wiring complication. Given how hyper sensitive Naim users are to switched mode PSU and locations of vibrating items (HD and internal fans in the USB box) within their fraim, they might find this a little too much to worry about. And the power consumption issues are the same as for Internal despite it being a USB connected storage device. Another issue is that the backup storage is right next to the Core and hence liable to suffer from same threats of power spike (shared mains), or theft if you get burglars.

Overall: its best to use external rear usb for portable SSD to do backups you can (and will!) take away from the Core and put somewhere safe, or to use as a portable transfer storage between two networks. (offsite backup to your holiday home, not mass copying of your friends material, of course) 

Network

Pros:

A NAS drive somewhere else in the house, down a length of ethernet which is good on every level (noise, power, heat, theft). You can go for whatever size you like. You can ensure it is mirrored with a hot-standby hard disc ready to go. You can have several of these, and have one for storage and one for backup, using the built in tools for backup provided in the NAS (eg the tools in synology for nas sync between devices). you can set up Dropbox (or equivalent) support so your storage is mirrored into the cloud (synology supports lots of this stuff).  Ripping is still easy - just rip to the nas that you have specified on Core. And Core can now shut down to power save mode

Cons:

Its more complex to set up because you need to think about shares and permissions. And you need to think about backup and archive just like internal. but you have the full range of flexibility here, and Core is doing what it does best which is serving out onto the network without worrying about the storage. However, the configuration of the core end has to be done via the IOS (or android when it comes) app because there is no web based management on a Core itself. 

However, if you have a grown-up NAS solution then it too can serve out onto the network to your Muso and NDS and... so if you streamed direct from NAS to endpoint, then the use-case for Core is good for ripping (which it does as a somewhat skeletal task at the moment with no metadata editing) or playback via BNC to a Naim NDAC in a larger system (which is what i am doing here).

Choices?

For my retail purchased Core I am probably going to put a 1Tb Samsung SSD within the Core and use that as the Core primary storage. However, I need to do the sums because I have 5k+ of CDs to rip.  I will use the backup facilities to archive to NAS on the network, and then treat that as a secondary playout source for other devices (EG doing MP3 sub-rips for iphone for in-car use etc -- Core doesnt (yet) do multiformat rip to MP3, unlike my HDX (or I presume Unitiserve)). Doing this requires a higher spend than going for an internal spinning disc solution, but I am not completely happy with the reality that the disc never spins down in Core, even though there are HD's out there designed for 24x7 operation in video surveillance tasks. The 15W power consumption minimum at all times I can live with in the context of the 150W idling of my old-skool six-pack DBL system which is left on all the time, but it does grate from a green perspective on a new product. Maybe SSD shutdown in standby mode will come in the future.

Hope this helps