The 3TB Challenge

I'm right there with you.  About 200GB away from the 4TB capacity of my NAS.  I have the same dilemma.  I'm thinking it is time to narrow down the music selection; prune back some discs that I never  play.  Fortunately I have a box full of old HDDs that I've outgrown over the years.  I can store the files there in case I ever need to retrieve them.  I never thought I would get here so quick, but the high-res PCM and DSD files are quickly adding up.

Hi Bert,

I don't use a NAS, I use an external WD Thunderbolt 2 x 4TB in RAID mode. I'm rapidly filling up the HD and will soon be in your position. One advantage is that I can piggyback with another HD. I don't know if you have that option with a NAS?

Steve

I simply added larger disks into my Netgear NAS when it got full up.. and for a while a ran two NASs which were accessed by a single media server so it all appeared as a single library, simples

Simon

I realize I can easily add more capacity.  Just past a certain point the tyranny of choice rears its ugly head.  I end up just listening to the same albums over and over instead of really exploring my music collection.  I'm starting to find the same thing with the streaming services.

Bert, I would quantify how many albums you think you will be adding in the future and at what Resolution. i.e. I just ripped my Pink Floyd Immersion Blu-ray WYWH at 96/24 6 Channel, it took 4.7 GB so 200 albums of that size will take 1TB of space.

You have 2 options to my mind. You get a 2 bay box with 2 up to 5TB drives and you are good for x amount of time ( depending on the size of drives and how many albums you are adding ). Or you get a 4 bay box and only put in 2 drives, when you start running out of space you just buy a new drive and add it in - depending on how you set up your drives/RAID.

I think you might be better with the 2 bay drive, but you need to get the appropriate drive sizes.

You should certainly be backing up the disks though in case of failure, so any old drives or the old NAS ?

Thanks for the tip, I do have a triple back up. As I have two separated nas's which are a mirror if each other and a separate backup disk. The one thing I am a bit scared if is the noise of bigger storage systems. The current one is in the closet close to the system in the main living room. Bigger nas's sometimes make more noise and also create heat, but keep them coming the ideas and tips.

I'm no help - in 25 years of buying music, I'm <1200 recordings. I very occasionally cull the collection by giving away or selling CDs and downloads I have no desire to play again, and limit new purchases just like in the days of real shops and discs.

EJ

Same as Simon, When I got close the limit, I temporarily removed one disk not part of the array used for audio, hot-swapped in a single large backup drive and copied all the music over. 

Then removed the drives used for the audio array and ordered some 6TB drives and slotted those and rebuilt the array. Finally copied my backed up music back to the new array. All this done on the same NAS fairly painlessly. NAS had 5 hot swap bays but to do all this only required 3 (2 for the actualy array and 1 for backing it up between swapping out the disks in the array).

The idea of a NAS is that it is scalable and there are a number of way to do it, the "easiest" being to slide in bigger drives. As long as everything is properly backed up the sky is the limit. Throw out music? Heresy!

I'm currently in the same postion and trying to decide whether to add capaciity to my nas or to leave the nas for video streaming and to move to a solution like Steve's and add a thunderbolt drive to my mac for music.  I already have everything backed up twice and I could still have MP3s on my Nas for my son to stream when he's in the mood.  At the moment the Thuunderbolt drive seems likely but we will see

Its a bit of a what to do dilemma,  but for me I made my mind up a while back & will upsize the HDD's as soon as I get to >75%.

I did consider the point that Mark makes, to prune back the the discs that I never  play,  but no I would prefer to keep even if I don't play them, one day, you never know,  deep mid winter etc...   

I have saved some disc space by converting a bunch of those 1960/70/80's pop/crap compilations to MP3,  in some respects they sound better with less detail of the poor recordings & on the odd occasions when its party time for geriatrics, no one actually listens anyhow.   

Thanks for the tips. But indeed I already have everything in flac, and I am having network challenges so I can't share the nas's so I have exact copies.

My story: I started with a 2 bay Synology NAS drive and populated it with 2x 4TB WD Red drives in RAID 1 mode.

Although I still have the original CDs, having to re-rip would be a nightmare, so I added a second NAS drive, same type, same disk capacity by different HDD manufacturer.  This backed up the former one.

I started to run short of space on both so I bit the bullet and bought a 4 bay Synology NAS enclosure and installed 4x 6TB HDDs configured via RAID 10.  I figured that 12TB of storage should keep me happy for a few years...

As to noise, it's certainly true that rack mount/enterprise units will be noisy.  My 2 bay Synology is so quiet that even in a quiet room, 1m away you can hardly hear them.  4 bay is only just slightly more noisy but is sited at other end of lounge so music is always louder than noise from NAS.

So the 4 bay is now my primary unit and I have backups to the 2 bay units with the data split between them.

Just buy one of these

stuff in a Mobo with e.g. FreeNAS and just keep adding discs.

6000!!!??? I can't even imagine the amount of choice - I have problems with my collection a quarter of that size. And lately when ever I deign to play music my three year old insists on one song by The Ventures. I say cull. Life is too short to even listen to that much as it is....

At least you have a backup, then! If you don't mind me asking, how do you sync the 2 NAS's?

That's a tricky one Bert.

I always try to oversize any storage whenever I buy it to try and make sure I never fill it before it dies, which it inevitably will, one day.

But I guess with file sizes getting bigger all the time it's really easy for us to rack up the spare space really quickly.

Im currently got 2TB capacity on my Unitiserve and 2TB capacity on my NAS and I've got a long way to go to get to 75% full, but the same question will come to me soon enough.

It will definitely be good to have a strategy ready for when the time comes.

But the Ventures were an instrumental group, who's singing?   

It wouldn't be "Walk, Don't Run"?

Just by simple using the third drive as the master and I always copy 1-1 and first check the result on the main results and make the last adjustments if needed and then copy on to the 2nd NAS.

Yes I know it is too much, but I am sometimes feeling the urge to have everything from a certain artist and that then creates the problem at the end. Obviously a lot of it is old history and will not likely get another listen (for instance the stuff my wife liked).

I say life is too short to cull records.

Why spend time culling stuff when you could be spending the time doing something useful?

What a complete waste of time!

'Wipe Out' actually. Story is I take her to a gymnastics class and some of the older girls were doing a routine to that song. So now every time the hifi comes on she requests 'gymnastics' music. And three year old girls don't take no for an answer.  

My reasoning was that its also a waste of time constantly scrolling through that many records in the app to find the ones that you actually want to play. Like the op said the choice becomes overwhelming and ends up playing only a handful of favorites as it is. That's always the way it was for me with cds - the ones stacked around the hifi got constant replay while the ones in the drawers languished. You don't actually have to delete them - just move to a secure hard drive that you can access at a later date if you really find yourself missing that certain something. 

I agree it would be nice to have a search function in N-Stream so that you don't have to scroll through everything to get to what you want. Shouldn't be too difficult? Maybe one for the next app update.