QNAP and bays

I don’t know the relative power of QNAPs as I use Synology,but generally acting as a NAS for streaming is pretty low processor activity, one of my NASes is the entry-level single bay and it serves high-res without a hitch. In terms of space you have loads. My 1,600 or so digital albums, mainly CD rips with a hundred or so hires, takes up a bit over 1TB, so your 3,000 need about 2 TB. In terms of bays, 2 drives running RAID in a single chassis is more then enough for that chassis, another 2 won’t do anything useful for a consumer service like home music.  I would recommend getting another NAS and mirroring to that, a single chassis with 2 drives is vulnerable to a chassis failure corrupting both disks, or even just taking your music off-air if it fails until you move the drives to a new chassis. Finally, I’d suggest getting a removable hard drive and backing up frequently and keeping it at your brother’s, to protect against fire/theft taking the NASes out. 

But to answer your original question, 2 bays of 6TB is comfortable enough as a single store.

If it is purely for streaming, your choise is perfect. I use a similar (219) NAD with 2 bays with WD 4Tb disks. This set up allows me to run Assett on the NAS and that is perfectly ok. A 4 bay gets interesting if you want more advanced RAID configurations, or (like I now consider) if you need 2 bays for SSD disks ro run Roon

A 12Tb QNAP TS-31P is far more capable than you actually need for audio use.

And please bear in mind that RAID is NOT a backup.  You'll still need to back your data (music etc.) files up to some independent storage device.  RAID only protects against HDD hardware failure, other events such as software errors, user errors and failure of the NAS itself (e.g. it's disk controller) can still leave your files unrecoverable.

Iver van de Zand posted:

If it is purely for streaming, your choise is perfect. I use a similar (219) NAD with 2 bays with WD 4Tb disks. This set up allows me to run Assett on the NAS and that is perfectly ok. A 4 bay gets interesting if you want more advanced RAID configurations, or (like I now consider) if you need 2 bays for SSD disks ro run Roon

Do you really need 2 bays just to run Roon? I was under the impression you could just run it from a USB stick on a NAS. 

I use a QNAP NAS with 2 bays. It's a popular choice on this forum.

There are so many different Qnaps that it’s a bit confusing. I have a TS253A and it works really well. It’s set to raid so that the two drives are mirror image copies. If one conks out, another can be swapped in and it recreates the copy. 

But as others have said, it’s not a proper backup. I have two USB drives that I use for this. If you plug them into the front and press the little button it will do a differential backup really easily. 

Eoink posted:

I would recommend getting another NAS and mirroring to that, a single chassis with 2 drives is vulnerable to a chassis failure corrupting both disks, or even just taking your music off-air if it fails until you move the drives to a new chassis.

Do you mean just making a backup to another NAS as RAID 1 can only be set up across a single array AFAIK?

Thanks for all the very helpful responses. As I thought, this was always going to be a journey. 

With all the great advice from the forum, my trusty local Naim dealer and dividing everything my brother says by 2 I’m hoping it won’t be too tricky.

Any advice for a first timer would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

robgr posted:

Eoink posted:

I would recommend getting another NAS and mirroring to that, a single chassis with 2 drives is vulnerable to a chassis failure corrupting both disks, or even just taking your music off-air if it fails until you move the drives to a new chassis.

Do you mean just making a backup to another NAS as RAID 1 can only be set up across a single array AFAIK?

I meant a second NAS, a RAID pair leaves you with the risk of a chassis failure taking out both drives. A cheap second  NAS with your music folders mirrored to that gives you security against that. To be honest, although I do have a 2 bay NAS with RAID mirroring to a single bay, if I set up from fresh now I’d probably go with 2 single drive NASes, and the offsite backup (removable USB drive).

HamiltonNZ posted:

Thanks for all the very helpful responses. As I thought, this was always going to be a journey. 

With all the great advice from the forum, my trusty local Naim dealer and dividing everything my brother says by 2 I’m hoping it won’t be too tricky.

Any advice for a first timer would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

 

Rip once, rip right is the standard advice...! Always rip to a lossless format. I rip to flac and then transcode to wav for playback.

I’d suggest DB poweramp software for ripping CDs, and Asset as the software to install on your QNAP for playback. Many other variants exist for each.

I use the QNAP settings which [@mention:44366773372132405] kindly sent me.

Hope that’s useful. Most ripping questions have been asked on the forum before (mostly by me), but if the search function doesn’t help then shout out - you’ll nearly always get a quick answer.

Happy to help out with the QNAP settings if needed - I’m contactable by email - it’s in my profile.

ChrisSU posted:

Do you really need 2 bays just to run Roon? I was under the impression you could just run it from a USB stick on a NAS. 

Yes, you can.