Distributed music storage.

I have a ReadyNAS Duo which mirrors as it goes. I think this will turn out to be my default music box if I can establish that music played from the HDX HDD is not superior in any way. It’s all a bit new to me at the moment as a user but well understood, I’ve just never seriously utilised the technology for music. The advantages I see are: storage is scalable and can be swapped out in seconds. If I need to say double the size of the music store disks are inexpensive and easy to install. A bigger disk for backup goes in first, then is swapped to the primary position, then another bigger back up goes in and that’s it. It doesn’t guard against both disks failing simultaneously but I’m giving that some thought. The cost of hardware introduces permutations which while expensive are as nothing compared to the value of the music collection. I’m presently going about my daily business as normal while ripping continues in the background. Frequent trips back to the drawer to load another disk can get tedious but this won’t last forever. I reckon most of my music will be over in about two months.

Hi Roy

I'm at the consumer end of the market I guess. I have a Mac Mini which feeds my Transporter's DAC via TOSLink or wireless and then to the Nait2. No music is stored on the Mini. A CD in inserted into the Mini and this is ripped (lossless) to a G-Drive Mini 500Gb external drive (this is powered by the Mac and is very quiet). I then backup to a G-Drive 500Gb standard external drive. The Mac Mini is 'headless' and I can see what is going on by any of the other 3 Macs in the house (screen sharing). Control is usually via an iPod Touch.

If my ext HD were to fail it would take about 2-3 hours to reinstall from the other drive. However most of my music is also on my iMac (MP3 as this was for the iPod before I ditched CDPs for good) so I could listen to this wirelessly to the Transporter. I have been using Macs for 20 years now and I have not had one fail me yet. Others have I'm sure. So the kit has been very reliable after a few teething problems (me getting to understand some nuances of the system).

The external drives will be replaced with SSD when the price drops and the available size increases but that will not be soon (current drives have proved to be very good a reasonably inexpensive (£160/£120)).

Regards

Neil

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How do you manage your store of music?

I keep three copies on separate hard drives. Two drives in my NAS and one in my PC.

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Do you have any/many hardware based problems - is your kit reliable?

One Samsung 1.5TB failed when it was about three weeks old. Fortunately it was not a complete failure so I w as a bel to get data off it.

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Are you planning any hardware upgrades?

I may purchase something else to play the music stored on my NAS.

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Are you at the consumer or enterprise end of the market?

Consumer.

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If you hardware failed how long would it be before you are once more listing to your tunes?

It would depend on the failure, but possibly a few hours work plus lead time to purchase replacement equipment. I could implement a temporary arrangement much more quickly.

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I may well be dipping my toe into this vast and ever changing digital ocean in the near future hence my questions.

It is perhaps easier if you are familiar with PC and networking technologies.

Many thanks for time, effort and thought expended on your replies . Between you and the thread devoted to NAIM tested NAS drives I feel a bit better about the whole thing. Many thanks.

quote:

How do you manage your store of music?

iTunes on an iMac at one end of the house. Uniti and Apple TV in the living room. Apple Time Capsule for wireless and automatic Time Machine backup of the whole iMac, not just music. EyeConnect and Playback UPNP servers.

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Do you have any/many hardware based problems - is your kit reliable?

Never a problem with any of the Apple kit. Running in this format or similar for a number of years now.

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Are you planning any hardware upgrades?

Nope. That said, I just bought a Hiface and upgraded the Time Capsule to the latest model.

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Are you at the consumer or enterprise end of the market?

Consumer - we all are. I can design an enterprise system (I do it for a living) but they are not designed for home use, nevermind audio. Pop into your nearest server room to get an idea of the noise involved!

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If your hardware failed how long would it be before you are once more listing to your tunes?

3-6 hours for a restore from the Time Capsule onto new/repaired hardware. In the meantime, I could connect the Time Capsule backups to my MacBook Pro and carry on streaming within maybe 10 minutes.

at the present cost of nas its best to have to two back ups disconnect and pack away safe. now that ive ripped 2600 cds the time to rip cds is minimal . think it will be quite away off that general stream cds will be available for downloading at high res anyway

John, would you be kind enough to explain how the hiface gets used. I thought that the apple tv could not output audio through the USB. Do you need to hack it to do so?

At present I am running a thecus N3200 nas, running in raid 5, plus an adittional backup of music and photos on a seperate hard drive on my pc.

The thecus nas passes all the naim nas tests with flying colours and it feeds my pc and sonos both fed to supernait. To date I have not had any hard wear issues, but if I did I can swtich to a backed up music collection in about 10 mins and swap out a faulty hd in my nas which would rebuild with no data loss.

Oscarskeeper - sorry, wasn't clear from my post, but the HiFace is intended for use on my second system and not with Apple TV. It will output from my iMac into a Musical Fidelity V-DAC and on to an Icon Audio valve amp.
John

Hi
I back up my NAS to a USB hard drive which is kept unplugged and unconnected at all other times so it would not be affected by power surges etc. The only thing that would wipe we completely out would be a burglar but I doubt they will look in the loft or a fire but I doubt my highest priority will be my music collection in that case!
If the NAS fails I can run from my PC so could be up and running in about ten minutes. I also have 95% of the original CD's but ripping them all again would be a right pain.

Get 2TB Seagates for under $200.

Back up using Synctoy (PC).

Keep backup drive(s) at a friend's house, work, safety deposit box, or anywhere in another structure.

I cannot imagine people needing more than two.

Easy as can be.

Resync every month or so. or after a big ripping session.

I use a USB 2TB drive attached to my Mini and use Time Machine to run the synchronisation. It works well. I was using my 1TB TimeCapsule, but with two other Macs using it over wireless as well, the network was often a bit congested during the hourly syncs. It was getting a bit full, too.

I note the precaution of disconnecting it when not using it and might consider that. My ultimate backup is the physical CDs.

quote:

Originally posted by pcstockton:

Back up using Synctoy (PC).

Keep backup drive(s) at a friend's house, work, safety deposit box, or anywhere in another structure.

I cannot imagine people needing more than two.

Easy as can be.

Resync every month or so. or after a big ripping session.

Wot Pat said!

WRT ReadyNAS Duo - keep spare 12VDC fan replacement handy–these have a tendency to die early.

Have just replaced a drobo with a QNAP and am delighted.

The qnap is a snap to set up, I got a TS410 which takes four 3.5 inch or 2.5in drives. ITs raided up at 5 so in the event a drive goes down you can carry on as usual.

It lives in the garage which is connected to the house via outside wall and not in anyway via the loft, my feeling being in the event of a house fire it *might* be alright.

However if it catches fire or gets nicked I have the music on another drive which is stored safely. That being said I would lose a tonne of data including 600gb of tv shows, but there you go.

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So folks;

# How do you manage your store of music?
# Do you have any/many hardware based problems - is your kit reliable?
# Are you planning any hardware upgrades?
# Are you at the consumer or enterprise end of the market?
# If you hardware failed how long would it be before you are once more listing to your tunes?

I have a Synology 209+ set up in raid (2 x mirrored WD10FYPS disks) + a sata-drive attached to it to back-up the contents of the Synology drive. And I keep an updated music back-up on my computer drive as well.

My kit is reliable. It is on 18 hours a day approximately. I stream wirelessly through a Netgear Gigabit wireless router to two Squeezeboxes. However, I have noticed that with 24 bit files my squeezebox duet placed the farthest away from my wireless router needs to rebuffer. This is not an issue with 16 bit music (WAV & FLAC). A cabled ethernet connection would cure that.

Hardware upgrade: 2x2tb disks - yes as I get my invaluble cassette tapes and vinyl records digitalized into Flac.

Consumer.

It would take me the time that it would take to exchange the failed disk(s), re-mirror or re-copy the contents over to the Synology and so. I would still have music in my study where my computer is located. I could use that to stream music too immediately if the complete Synology had been toasted (cross my fingers!).

Best wishes,
Peter

Yes one thing I did take the time to do was ethernet throughout the house. I was lucky in two respects. This house doe snot currently have in wall insulation and every room has a phone line.

I use DECT phones so replaced most of the phone points with ethernet and banged some in the under stairs and garage for good measure.

The only wireless used is for my lappy for surfing. Cannot beat wires when all is said and done.

Garyi,

interested to read that you just replaced a Drobo with QNAP. Having just invested in Drobo ! Anything to share ?

Cheers, Paul

I used a 1Tb Terastation Pro NAS configured as RAID5, had one disk failure in 2 years, seamless recovery. It and the music server are protected by a 1kVA UPS which gracefully shuts both down if power is lost for more than 15 mins. I also backup to a 1Tb USB HD every month or so.

Paul, the drobo's maximum speed was 10MB/s from the horses mouth.

The QNAP is averaging 45MB/s

What this does for music is probably debatable. What it does for my network and streaming hi def video is measurable.

Other concerns was the fact I lost 2 harddrives in a year through it. I may well have been unlucky.

There are a number of points though.

1. I was using a droboshare, which is OK for streaming music, not good for intensive work and certainly not good for the amount of crap I shunt around my network
2. I had a gen 1 drobo.
3. I am a geek and want lots of options, drobo gives you virtually no options, the drobo apps which requires a droboshare are all very poor.

All in all I found in the end the drobo was like apple in terms of design principles, i.e. keep it simple, however they tipped the balance. No forum access without a serial number (!) and the logs are scrambled so in the event of an issue you are not privvy to what went wrong.

No thanks.

I notice one or two mention backing up their NAS drive using a USB hard drive. As someone who's been there I can only reiterate the importance of this. We effectively lost our NAS a year or so back, it's a long story, but briefly it became jammed up due to a rougue version of Twonky software and we were without it for about 5 weeks while Netgear and finally our dealer battled to sort it out. We were lucky we didn't actually lose any data, but had we had it backed up, we could have done a hard boot and been back up running by the next day. The raid backup within the NAS proved to be absolutely useless as it was the NAS itself which went down.

Gary

Gary S - completely agree RAID gives resiliance, but it's not the same as having a backup.

I've just built my house, and had it wired with cat6, which all leads to the patch panel. Then connected to a D-Link gigabit switch (which has option of fitting fibre modules should VirginMedia go that way).

All music is ripped with dbPowerAmp, while DVD's are ripped with Magic DVD Ripper, and all stored on a QNAP TS-409U NAS rack server with 4 x 1.5TB 7200rpm drives configured in RAID5.

Both the NAS and the switch are powered by an APC 750VA UPS, so main supply is not a problem. It shouldn't be anyway, as I had a 3-phase supply installed and, yes, a dedicated spur off one of the phases

Performance is outstanding! Only thing is, I haven't worked out how to back-up 4.5TB of data yet!!



Steve

Nice rack Steve!

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Originally posted by intothevoid:
...
Performance is outstanding! Only thing is, I haven't worked out how to back-up 4.5TB of data yet!!



Steve

The only option is to add another computer into the picture with > 4.5 TB storage and use incremental or continuous backup-strategies. The first run will take long but after that it should be fairly quick.

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aleg