NAS

[bub]

My IT guy just left . He wants to use Seagate Black Armor for storage .. I trust the guy but would like second opinion ., It's just for music. Will this work ?? Or is there something better ?

[Cory Cooper]

A couple of questions for you...

-What kind of price range are you looking at?
-How much storage space in total?
-Which RAID level?

C

[bub]

Hey Cory. Time to do more research. He mentioned Black Armour with two hard drives ? I did look at website and they have a home central system with up to 4 TB for a couple of hundred. Not sure about RAID. I did read up on it. But it left me in the dust. Thinking is not my strong suite. That's why I poised the question. Price within reason shouldn't be an issue. Just don't have a clue how much memory I need. Ideally I would like to store movies also and I know they eat up space. I guess I'm more interested in what you would do ? Thanks.

[klinemj]

I like my WD MyBook Live. Has cloud access (which recently had an temporary outage issue but overall works) and had good price/storage. Good tech support also.

Mark

[Nodscene]

If you are serious about storing your music and movies on a NAS, I would really consider paying the money for a decent unit. QNAP, Drobo, and Synology are about the most popular ones, 4 bay, RAID5, and would probably use Western Digital Red drives to keep the costs down a bit. This way you have a quality unit, lots of features, and good data transfer speeds. A lot of the cheaper NAS' out there don't have enough horsepower to be able to transfer data faster than 10mb/s give or take (Netgear, D-Link etc) so it takes ages to upload stuff.

[thevinoman]

Apr 7, 2014 21:17:49 GMT -5 Nodscene said:

If you are serious about storing your music and movies on a NAS, I would really consider paying the money for a decent unit. QNAP, Drobo, and Synology are about the most popular ones, 4 bay, RAID5, and would probably use Western Digital Red drives to keep the costs down a bit. This way you have a quality unit, lots of features, and good data transfer speeds. A lot of the cheaper NAS' out there don't have enough horsepower to be able to transfer data faster than 10mb/s give or take (Netgear, D-Link etc) so it takes ages to upload stuff.

I have a Synology 2 bay with 3TB total, and it has performed flawlessly and fast.  Good user interface, recommended.

[novisnick]

Hey , the V man,,,,,you have a model number or web link to that Synology 2 bay 3T NAS.
Sure would appreciate it bud.

Nick

[Chuck Elliot]

Nix the Seagate Black Armor.

I put one on our network at work for a bit of extra storage. Slow-Slow-Slow. It takes almost as much time to delete a large group of files and it does to write them, which is also slow. I just don't like the unit!

[rogersch]

Like Nodscene I can only recommend to go for a QNAP or Synology. They have a broad range of different units that suits a lot of different needs. But most importantly software support is really great, at least for the Synology. The software for the NAS is being supported up to 5 year and even thereafter if there are security issues they will provide a patch. The software of the Synology is really great.

[GreenKiwi]

If I were going with a NAS, I'd go with QNAP or Synology (in alphabetic order), they are pretty close to each other in terms of features and performance.

That being said, if you can describe how you want your whole system to function, people might be able to provide better suggestions.

Both for video and for audio. I'd describe each with, what types of files you're going to have and where the different places you are going to play them back from. Describing the playback devices is going to be most helpful here.


In the end, a NAS may or may not be the best solution for you. But if you do get one, Synology or QNAP (reverse alphabetic order).

There are other solutions that may or may not be applicable. Do you already have a PC or Mac that runs all the time? Could it be used? Drives are so large and cheap... one alternative, that I'm moving to is getting a 4TB drive and just attaching it to my Mac Mini. Giving up on RAID and my NAS and using the cloud for backup. My mac mini runs all the time and Backblaze and Crashplan will do unlimited internet backups for $50/year. If you're really concerned about a drive dying, have a second drive mirrored on the machine or on another machine elsewhere with syncing software like BTSync.

[yves]

I own 14 external harddrives and a pair of USB hubs. In total, they give me 28 TB of external harddrive storage space, and, if I had chosen to go for a typical NAS solution, it would have more than doubled the total cost, yet it wouldn't have added anything that can be useful to me. [ I known I don't mention this very often, but I have a formal degree in IT ].

[geebo]

How about a router with a USB connection for a hard drive? It works fine for me...

[copperpipe]

Apr 8, 2014 3:59:24 GMT -5 yves said:

I own 14 external harddrives and a pair of USB hubs. In total, they give me 28 TB of external harddrive storage space, and, if I had chosen to go for a typical NAS solution, it would have more than doubled the total cost, yet it wouldn't have added anything that can be useful to me. [ I known I don't mention this very often, but I have a formal degree in IT ].

I sure hope you are using some sort of redundancy (raid or better yet zfs) with those 14 drives (or alternatively you don't care much what's on them).

[Jim]

My solution:

[Cory Cooper]

I agree with the suggestions about Synology, Drobo, etc. I haven't heard much about the Black Armor unit. Have you thought about using a direct connection (USB) instead of network (Ethernet/Wi-Fi)?

Things that are important here:

-At least RAID 1, if not RAID 5 or even RAID 10.
-Backup - RAID is not a backup solution, so I recommend having the RAID NAS backed up to another drive or RAID for data protection. Remember, it's not a question of if a HD will fail, but when.
-Depending on the unit selected, the WD Red drives may or may not be the best solution.
-Enterprise-class drives aren't necessarily better for this particular solution.
-In my experience, and recent online reports from online backup provider Backblaze (27K hard drives in use), have shown drive failure rate rankings as follows (best to worst):

Hitachi
WD
Seagate

Three-year, 27,000 drive study reveals the most reliable hard drive makers

I recently bought a RAID 1 unit for use on my MacBook Pro as a day-to-day storage unit. To make a long story short, I first bought two Seagate drives - one was DOA. I then bought two WD Black drives - two different model years inside the retail boxes. I ended up with Hitachi drives and they are working flawlessly. However, I have used Seagate drives almost exclusively through the years in all my Macs, with assorted Hitachi and WD drives mixed in. My failure rates mirror the Backblaze results.

Of course, recommendations for this are the same as they are for audio, subjective and personal preference.

Great info shared so far by all,

C

[ÈlTwo]

I have an older QNAP, fine for streaming music, and fine for movies so long as I don't select Dolby TrueHD or dts Master.
There is also an LG NAS on my network for backup.

I've read great things about Synology.

novisnick,
By the way, if you look in his signature thevinoman has a Synology DS212J

[novisnick]

Apr 8, 2014 11:29:39 GMT -5 ÈlTwo said:

I have an older QNAP, fine for streaming music, and fine for movies so long as I don't select Dolby TrueHD or dts Master.
There is also an LG NAS on my network for backup.

I've read great things about Synology.

novisnick,
By the way, if you look in his signature thevinoman has a Synology DS212J

Missed it , thanks,,,,,,

[KeithL]

Just to shock everyone, I'm going to make a case for simplicity here...... 

Think about how you actually use or play your music and what you need.

A NAS is cool; it lets you access your music from multiple locations, holds a huge amount of music, and, if properly configured, can even back itself up (and repair itself if something goes wrong). HOWEVER, setting up and administering a NAS can get complicated. Do you buy it already loaded with drives? You can probably save money by buying the NAS "box" and adding your own drives, but then you're going to have to do some research to find out which drives work well in your unit. Also, remember that a NAS unit itself is a computer - which means that it can have all the problems that happen to computers. So, if you happen to like computers, or have a 14 year old nephew who likes to show off, then you're fine. Otherwise, it may always be smooth sailing, or you may be in for rough seas and a few headaches. (Also don't forget that fancy RAID arrays WON'T protect you if someone steals your drive, or if the house burns down and takes the drive with it, of if you get a solid lightning strike that fries it. In fact, a RAID array won't even protect you if your player/computer starts corrupting files while its playing them; or if you hit "delete" by mistake - RAID ONLY protects you from drive failures. To protect against that other stuff, you'll need to make backups.)

So what's the alternative?

Well, a 3 tB desktop USB drive currently goes for about $120 at Walmart (or your favorite discount store). A 3 tB drive can hold about SIX OR EIGHT THOUSAND albums as CD-quality FLACs (or half that many uncompressed WAV files, or close to a thousand 24/192 versions). A simple drive doesn't have all the fancy RAID redundancy and automatic backup that you'd get with a NAS, but you also don't have all that stuff to worry about and set up. To make a backup, simply buy ANOTHER 3 tB drive and, every so often, copy your entire music drive to it. (It might take overnight, but so what?)

Now, if you really need to be able to play your music in multiple locations, or if you have an amazingly large album collection, or if we're including videos in the discussion, then a NAS may be for you. Or, if you really want an included DLNA server, then that's another thing most NAS's include. BUT, if you really just need a drive to store music on, and to have sitting next to a computer so you can play that music, then a simple USB drive may be all you need - and a lot simpler (and cheaper) than the alternatives. You also avoid "network issues" and all that fun stuff.

Incidentally, whether you do a NAS or not, do remember to BACK UP YOUR MUSIC. Even the fanciest RAID array only protects you from drive failures; it won't stop you from deleting a file by mistake, and won't tell you if one of your files gets corrupted by a program (like your music player). Your music library, AND THE EFFORT THAT WENT INTO ORGANIZING IT, is a HUGE investment. Backups are cheap; loss is painful; do the right thing!

Here's another major suggestion: invest in a program that does checksums or file verification.....

If you have a backup copy of your music library, the most obvious way to make sure that it remains 100% intact is to periodically compare the "main copy" to the backup. However, there are THREE problems with doing this:

1) Comparing that many files takes a long time and can be somewhat complicated (depending on how you did the backup).

2) If your backup is slightly outdated, it gets VERY complicated to tell what's damaged and what's just different.

3) Even if your backup is current, it can still be a problem to tell which copy is "the good one" if your main copy and backup disagree on a few files. (It's also possible that the file got corrupted a long time ago, and you just haven't played it since then, in which case the backup could also be bad... and, if you keep multiple backups, it's going to be tricky to tell which one is the good one.)

In contrast, you can run a checksum of all the files on the drive. The program calculates a number for each file - using a special type of algorithm - and stores the numbers for all the files in a list. (That special number, properly called a CRC, is calculated such that, even though it is only a single number, and so doesn't take up much storage space, it is VERY unlikely that you could change or damage the file without also changing its checksum.) Then, when you want to check your files, it does the same thing again - only, this time, it compares the new checksums to the stored list and confirms that they match. Doing this is a lot faster than comparing every file every time, and the program will give you a list of every file that has changed since the original checksum list was stored.

Here's the program I use (it costs $15 for a personal license)

www.kvipu.com/CDCheck/download.php

[bub]

Thank you everyone. This had been a valuable learning experience. A lot of good suggestions. It should be perfectly evident that this isn't my forte.. I did spend a couple of hours reading and watching videos...And I feel like I'm getting up to speed..

I'm a little disappointed that my IT guy recommended Seagate Black Armour. As you mentioned Chuck. There was a YouTube showing how slow Seagate is.. Very frustrating to watch..
At this point I need to rethink all my options Simpler is better ( at least for me ). At least now I have the information to make a decision..
All the NAS info was right on the money. Synology ironically has my area code for support..
But as some have mentioned. It might be overkill for my needs. That's my fault. I brought up NAS.
IT will be here Fri to update some software and upgrade some hardware.. I'll know more then.

[hemster]

I spent a very long time organizing my music collection (30,000+ tracks) and really don't want to re-do that. Some of the music I have is rare and I'm quite sure, irreplaceable.

My current approach that has served me well is to have 3 USB drives. One is the primary (A) which I use to stream music from and the other 2 are backups. Whenever I add/make changes to the collection, it's always on the primary (A). Then I sync to the other 2 drives (B & C) using a simple Robocopy command. If any drive were to fail, I will simply replace it with a new one and not run the risk of losing my music. The backup drives are physically stored in separate locations around the house, providing redundancy in case of theft. For not much coin, I sleep peacefully knowing my music is protected from loss. Of course a fire or such catastrophic damage means lights out and I'm pondering making another drive copy and storing that at the bank safe deposit vault with other important paperwork.