NAS Placement?

Pev, I really welcome your last comments 

..."but I did carefully say "for our purposes". A single 2tb external hard drive can be bought for well under £100 and would hold a complete music backup for most people."

I have recently bought a mac mini into a Young Dac,which I use solely for streaming with iTunes.

My music library of some 750 ripped cds is backed up onto my macbook pro,a cheap 1tb hard drive and an even cheaper old 500gb portable hd drive. I keep thinking I need to buy a nas but  become extremely confused with which nas to buy,which raid configuration ,and other complicated things to my computer illiterate brain such as twonky,UPnP,ethernet switches etc,etc.

 I love the simplicity of apple streaming, using a mac and some airport expresses dotted around the house.

My point I suppose is, I keep it simple and stick to what I understand and will move on as and when I grasp a knowledge  of what I'm doing!?

AS I understand it you are not streaming in technical terms. You have a digital file on the Mac wich you send to the dac and from there it is analog. Streaming means that the digital signal it sent over the lan network and processed in a streamer. It is the same with my ns01, as llong as I play music on the internal hard disk, I do not see it as streaming, but a process closer to playing from a cd, just that the data comes from the internal hard disk.

If you do not have a streamer you can forget about upnp wich in many cases seems to mean a much happier life, at least based on all the upnp server talk on this forum.

I have  finally chosen a nas for backup and maybe streaming to my ns01, but basicly to get a second backup of my music stored on the ns01.

It seems that most of the consumer nas units takes care of the choice of raidd, meaning they have a raidd implementation that gives disk security so one disk can fail without you lose data, rather than speed and more space. And raidd is only possible with a minimum of 2 disks installed in a nas, the alternative being a backup to an external usb disk.

Claus

Claus is of course correct that Andrew's setup is technically not streaming as such. However although this section of the Forum is called "streaming audio" many of the issues raised here are not strictly streaming. I would still think that issues relating to systems such as Andrew's belong here rather than in say Hi-Fi Corner where we would really scare the luddites! I'm not suggesting a change of name ("client-server" is the best term I can think of that would cover the range of topics on here and that is even more like jargon).

I think it is wonderful that this Forum has evolved into such a supportive and well informed source of help (necessitated largely because of patchy dealer support). I have certainly learned a lot from the posters on here. However it seems to me there are 2 types of discussion: basic troubleshooting to get a system running reliably; and tweaking/optimisation to squeeze out the last ounce of performance. One can so easily morph into the other half way down the page. Of course both "belong" on here and discussions naturally evolve. I don't have an easy answer - maybe a emoticon type flag to warn neophytes about technically intense threads (here be geeks!) or highlight accessible "how to" threads - bike with training wheels?

Just a final point: Andrew's words - " I keep thinking I need to buy a nas but  become extremely confused" sums the issue up to me. If you are happy now you really don't need to buy a NAS! It's not intrinsically better - if you don't have a problem with a pc in the listening room then stick with that. My personal view is that using a NAS should be a last resort not the default,  though individuals' needs and circumstances will vary. Given the number of threads about NAS/RAID/UPNP issues maybe a dedicated thread just on the trade offs between pc based versus NAS based music systems would be worthwhile?

WOW GUYS!!!!!!!!!!!

I bought the 411 and had an IT tech friend over today to put it all together, I would never be able to figure all that out.  I took him out to a great lunch and back to finish up the job. He was fascinated with it all but didn't stick arround to really listen.

AMAZING SOUND  need I say more?  Now to find some hi def stuff, there goes a grand....

Claus, not that it really matters, but technically Andrew's set up is streaming. Streaming media is the flow of media to the the end device such that it can be presented before all the media has been completely sent. Radio is an example of streaming, but usually streaming is often linked to physical distribution systems such as networks. The first industrial media streamers were used for piping music around offices and factories in the 1930s.

So a book or CD are not streamed media if you are reading the media directly. If you start presenting the medium  where it is presented to you where you dont have a finite start and completion  from the view of the receiver it is considered streamed. Many ripped CD audio files sent  over a network from a media server is an example that it is streamed media. Remotely controlling a CD by the listener is not. A stock ticker, weather update ticker or news ticker or http posting are also examples of streamed media.

Streaming is not limited to upnp,AirPlay etc, which really is a tiny narrow area of the streaming media industry.