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pbm

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  1. jtm, I have a Drobo 5D, which is closely related to the Drobo Mini DigiPete mentioned. It offers great speed, the ability to accept/hot swap/upgrade any SATA drive in any form factor, and very simple operation. Its five drives can be filled with any combination of HDD's and SSD's. It also has an external power supply, so in principle one could upgrade that, too. Unfortunately, I've found it's fan just a bit too loud to make it the ideal DAS solution for music files, so it serves as my local backup drive for now. I've not compared the 5D side by side with the Mini and thus couldn't say which is quieter, though I remember Cnet describing the latter's fan as particularly loud. I've also never seen/heard a Pegasus R4/6 in person, though it's apparently well received by all. In my opinion, a fan-less version of the 5D, or another drive with the same feature set, would be just about ideal. Unfortunately, I know of nothing current or planned that fits this description -- though I will, like you, keep searching...
  2. This is my first post here, a site I just recently found but have already much appreciated. My apologies in advance if this particular topic has already been addressed. As the title suggests, I'm looking into setting up NAS, and can't decide between using a Synology product or a Mac Mini with Thunderbolt storage attached. In terms of speed, I think the MM/T setup would be far faster. For example, Synology lists the max read speed of a DS412+ as about 180Mbps, while daisy-chained LaCie 2big's supposedly max out at 670Mbps (using 4+ separate units and RAID 0, I assume). From what I can tell, those numbers are approximately representative of both Synology and Thunderbolt options. In terms of versatility, it seems the MM would be superior, simply because it's a more fully-fledged computer that can be updated and upgraded more easily and thoroughly than a Synology product. As a result, I'm guessing it would also be the better machine if, in the future, someone else was trying to serve video in one room while I was listening to music in another. Obviously DSM 4.1 offers a lot of functionality that doesn't come standard with OS X, though I'm not sure how much of that gap remains if one installed OS X server on the MM. Either way, I don't think that'll affect my choice too much. As I understand things, the Synology's major advantage (depending on the model chosen) is price. As I'm not blessed with infinite income, that will be a major consideration. Most fundamentally, I don't imagine that either will give me a noticeably different sound when I'm actually listening, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
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