JBOD or RAID 0 where redundancy is not needed

My understanding is raid will be quicker for reading, but for writing you will find it a bit slower. This should not be an issue.

The best way to improve reliability and speed is with ram and CPU, I understand the qnap can take up to 3 gigs but is shipped with one. That would be my first port of call.

Then ensure you have a decent router in place and of course the router should be properly ethernet wired to the NAS either directly or via a decent switch.

I personally would then use RAID for those read speeds and you should have a great system. QNAP has many functions out of the box, if its purely for music distribution as you say then I would turn off those other options such as photosharing etc.

One other thing, if you intention on the music only front is some belief it will improve sound or what ever, then I would think again at utilise that qnap for all its worth. It has four bays the other two could be used to store films etc that could be served via PLEX to a myriad of devices, including delivering all that music via the web to your phone/PC when out and about.

If you are only accessing music files with it then the extra speed of RAID 0 will do little for you. Best to stick with JBOD or Raid 1. Raids like 0 are best if doing video production or other large file intensive work. 

Completely agree, no need for RAID 0, which is generally done for performance. Plenty of performance for music streaming without it.  It also in theory reduces the reliability, as you stripe your data across multiple drives without redundancy.  So the chances of losing data are multiplied by the number of drives in the RAID set.

You'd be surprised at the difference Raid 0 makes for music. 

Yeah, esp when your Raid goes bust and you have complete silence.

But please elaborate. I just can't imagine that you would need much faster. 

I have a QNAP 421  with a 2 drive RAID 1 config, I have NEVER seen the buffer level on my ND5XS drop below 100%, even when I was dumping 35GB of photos onto the NAS while streaming off it.

So the speed is more than enough without resorting to RAID 0.

Redundancy isn't an issue, if a drive dies I have all the music backed up, so just reformat the drive that's alive and kicking, add another one, restore backup and hey presto!

I'm leaning towards RAID 0 at the moment, my instinct being that anything that improves read/write times can only be a good thing.

SJB

Well its certainly nice to see a good throughput speed, but it won't improve write speeds. As I say the biggest improvement you can make is the horsepower of the Nas/Server and ram.

QNAP do not come up very well in this regard in relation to cost, but now you have one, you might as well max out the ram at the very least.

Unless there exists a dedicated RAID controller, disk I/O will be slower on an embedded device with RAID enabled. Best to stick with JBOD and a sensible file system.

As SB wrote, please be warned that when you configure 2 or more drives as a single RAID0 volume that you would lose the entire file system when either of the drives fails. It behaves like a Christmas tree light chain. So the probability for a complete volume failure is not reduced compared to single drives but doubled, tripled or quadrupled, depending on the number of drives. With RAID0 you actually have anti-redundancy.

Recovering, say, 4*4TB = 16TB from backup would take at least 2 days at gigabit speed.

Your performance gains would be negligible.

If you really don't want redundancy then you should configure 2 or more drives as 2 or more independent volumes. In this case the failure of a drive only takes down one volume and keeps the others intact.

I would agree for music only duties simple is best. On my back up OMV server I have four drives configured individually as four volumes.

Thanks for all your advice, seems like JBOD is winning the contest.

I have to admit RAID 0 is like an itch  I have to scratch, if the NAS can implement it it seems a step up from plain old JBOD.

SJB

You know, as long as you have a secure back up then you alight as well try it. You can always reformat the drives to Raid 1 or JBOD later if you want. I just seriously think there will be no sped improvement for audio files. If you were doing heavy lifting in Final Cut or Lightroom or some such program and also needed a larger than 4gb drive then yes. Keep in mind audio files stream, and are therefore limited by the buffer of the hardware they are streaming into.