Jataro

Hi mwheelerk, Thank you for the reply. I currently have almost 2TB of music files and I've got another 3-400 CDs to archive. I could do something similar to what you have if I used a 3TB drive but I want to future proof a little by giving myself lots of extra space. To do that with a FW daisy chain would (I think) start running up costs significantly once I hit 3-4 drives. At that point 1 enclosure would be cheaper or at least cleaner. Thank you again! Jat

Hi all, I am putting together a new computer based audio system for my living room. I'm sorry if these are really newb questions but I'm a little stuck on on to proceed from here. For convenience, space, and cost reasons I will be using a mac mini and I was hoping I could get some advice on a good NAS or external HDD array to place all of my CD files on (stored in apple lossless). I would like to get a 5 or 6 bay solution to allow for plenty of space. I will probably run RAID 5 or 6 and if anyone has experience with pros/cons I would really appreciate their input. I would like it to be automatically recognized by the computer and able to be searched and run via Puremusic or Decibel. I think I would be happy with an external array since I really only need storage space but I don't have any experience with these so I don't know that for certain. Ultimately, my goal is to run the system from an IPAD. I read through the CASH list and checked out the Drobo S. From the review here it sounds great but non-CA user forums are really very negative about it, especially regarding write speed. I have experience with synology and it has worked for me well but they are more expensive and since this will be run off of a computer I don't know that I really need that much functionality. Any thoughts on this are really appreciated. Thank you. Jat

Thank you for the reply. I'm glad I've got the basic plan straight. Main reason I need a new array is data size and ensuring data backup via RAID. I had one brand new hard drive fail 4 months into owning it and I would have lost at least 2-300 hours of music archival work if I didn't have it backed up. In addition my current NAS box just doesn't have enough processing power/RAM and really slows down when I'm doing a lot of tag editing work or copying large amounts of information to it. Do people think the Promise arrays are worth the added expense. If this is used just to read/write music files I'm not sure that the extra bandwidth is going to really get used. What arrays do other people use for their servers? Any advantage of getting anything but the most basic Mac mini? Any reason for a SSD over a standard disc drive in a music server? Again, thank you for your thoughts on this! Jat

Hi all, I am hoping to get advice on how to best put together a music server. I currently have 1.2TB of music in Flac that I stream to a squeezebox. It works well but it does have some limitations, most notably limited high-res ability (not so important now, but in the future it might be) and it cannot be made a slave to an external master clock (which I believe can make a DAC sound much better). For this reason I think moving to a computer based server is a good choice. After reading through a lot of this forum I think I have a good general plan but I wanted to get people's thoughts before I got started to try and avoid any mistakes. My plan goes like this: Get basic mac mini, keep it "headless," use VNC to allow my Ipad to control the mini, access music library via Pure-music/itunes from external hard drive array, and send digital data via USB to my DAC. The music files will be ripped and sent wirelessly to the music library (via the mac mini) from a separate computer. If people don't mind, I'd be very grateful if I could get opinions on: 1) have I thought this through correctly? 2) any advice on external storage solutions. I currently have 500 CDs that have yet to be archived so I need a whole new drive array (current one is only 2 discs) 2a) is a thunderbolt solution worth the added cost? 3) is it better to just run the system "headed" with a wireless mouse and keyboard connected to the TV? Any other thoughts or ideas on this would be really appreciated. And if this has been addressed in another thread I apologize. I looked back about 10 pages and did a google search and didn't find it. Thank you. Jat