WoodsDweller

A business has a constant stream of transaction data which needs to be protected, and they can't afford to lose the last 30 minutes of transactions. They also have reliability requirements, since a down system means they aren't making money. But we're just talking about your music collection and the effort you put forth to rip it, and the backup requirements are a lot less rigorous. If you have 2000 discs ripped and you back them up, and you buy and rip 25 new discs over three months, and you lose your data and have to restore from a three-month-old backup, oh noes! you have to rip 25 discs over again. That's an inconvenience that you have to weigh against the time demands of more rigorous backups. This shouldn't be presented as a false choice between not doing backups, vs. painstakingly doing daily off-site backups. Your data is far safer if stored on one single drive with a periodic copy onto a second, external drive, than it is with a RAID 1 using two discs and no backups. Of course, that's another false choice, since you could, for example, store on a RAID array, and have a backup on a single drive (if it's big enough), or a second RAID array. RAID isn't a problem, feeling safe because you use RAID is a problem.

Reviews of Promise NS2300N, Qnap TS-509Pro, Co-World ShareDisk Pro 400 At Tom's Hardware.

While reading reviews today I came upon this comment by some user, dated April 2008. I'm not going to identify the manufacturer of the NAS unit, because it doesn't matter. I'm not going to link to the original post, because it identifies the manufacturer, and it doesn't matter. It has nothing to do with any shortcoming on the part of the manufacturer, it is not a problem with their tech support (contrary to what the original poster seems to think), and only somewhat on the part of the user (he should have backed up his RAID array before applying a firmware upgrade). When I mention (repeatedly, and people may be getting tired of it by now) that RAID isn't a backup, this is one example of the sort of thing I'm talking about. Stuff happens. Your data, and the time you spend producing your data, are important, too important to be working without a net. Back it up! After applying the first firmware update, the *** rebooted and my Mac informed me that the connected disk was unformatted and asked what I wanted to do (Initialize, Ignore, Eject). As you can imagine, I was immediately filled with panic and dread. Over the past five years or more, I've built a huge (legal) music collection. I'm a music freak and buy between 5 and 10 CDs each month. I had painstakingly ripped each and every one of my 2000+ CDs to the ***, both in Apple Lossless format for my home stereo and AAC format for my iPod. I can't even imagine how many hours (hundreds?) I spent doing this. I also took the time to verify all of the metadata (artist, album, etc) and correct any tag errors. As you can imagine, this was VERY TEDIOUS!!! Recently I've been ripping my DVD collection and converting it to MP4 for my Apple TV. Each rip/conversion takes between 3-4 hours. A hundred DVDs or so and you're looking at another 300 hours of time spent. So, I called *** tech support. They walked me through a procedure that involved removing and re-inserting the drives. At first this didn't work. Then the tech told me to change the position of the drives in the ***. Voila! It took about three days to "protect" the data. After this process had finished, my data was back and I was much relieved. Until the next firmware update. The most recent update completely hosed my data. This time, tech support's procedure didn't work. It took 12 days to "protect" my data and when all was finished, my data was lost. Throughout this experience, I made efforts to contact tech support. I sent them my ***'s diagnostic files, as requested. Someone from *** sent me the occasional terse email saying "This is a high priority case!" or "Please be patient!" A month later, how patient am I supposed to be??? At this point, I've accepted that my [2 TB of] data is gone.

Interesting! After fiddling around today, I was unable to get my DAC (part of my HeadRoom amp) to run as a 2.0 device, so presumably they did the same thing, for the same reasons.

The POSIX utility system_profiler is the command-line equivalent of the System Profiler application that runs when you select "About This Mac" from the Apple menu, and click the "More Info..." button in the resulting dialog. The advantage of system_profiler is that it allows finer control over the output. In a Terminal window, type or paste the following command: system_profiler SPUSBDataType When you press Return, you'll see a descriptive list of all USB devices connected to the host. It's the same information you get from System Profiler by selecting Hardware » USB.

If Woz was still running R&D, this wouldn't have happened! A little more testing, here. My cutoff while scrolling is still there (maybe that's just a problem with the Linux USB implementation...), maybe not as bad. Maybe. However, subjectively, my DAC sounds better after having a root hub to itself. The 'lsusb' command is pretty Linux-specific. Chris, is there an OS X equivalent? Seems like this is a step everybody should take when setting up their system. I'll sure be doing it from now on.

Somewhere on your motherboard, buried most likely in the southbridge, are several USB controllers ("root hubs"). The bandwidth of a given USB subsystem is shared between all the devices (up to 127, IIRC) connected to that controller. Controllers are cheap, and generally they assign one controller per port, and if you don't attach multiple devices (say, using an external hub with multiple connections) it should stay one-to-one. I suspect that if you had multiple devices attached to the same controller as your PRE is using, it could disrupt the signal since some of the bandwidth would have to be shared with the other devices. I doubt Apple would do such a thing, but you never know. I built a system last month that had a very nice case, but the case for some reason ran both USB ports on the front to a single jack on the motherboard, thus forcing them both to share one controller. Crazy. Maybe they were thinking that people would plug game controllers in, or something. HUH!!!! $ lsusb Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 003: ID 08bb:2902 Texas Instruments Japan Bus 004 Device 002: ID 046d:c01a Logitech, Inc. M-BQ85 Optical Wheel Mouse Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub This shows my DAC is sharing the same controller (root hub) as my mouse (004)! Freeky! By swapping the USB jack to another plug, I get: $ lsusb Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 002: ID 046d:c01a Logitech, Inc. M-BQ85 Optical Wheel Mouse Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 002: ID 08bb:2902 Texas Instruments Japan Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Now they are not both on the same USB bus, which is good. However, I didn't find Bus 001 or Bus 002 on any of the external jacks. I should really have the DAC plugged into a 2.0 root hub. I'm going to have to play around with this some more, maybe fetch a USB bracket from my pile of parts and see if I can attach the DAC to a better hub. BTW, I was having a problem in which holding the mouse button down and scrolling would sometimes freeze audio playback. Maybe this will fix it! Maybe some of the local OS X whiz kids here can tell you how to do something equivalent to "lsusb". You want to make sure that the PRE has a 2.0 root hub all to itself.

... you should be able to set up fully automatic backups across your network. It appears that OS X ships with rsync, and I'm sure that there are any number of spiffy Mac backup apps that will handle automatic backups.

Wikipedia says that a 1394 cable can be 4.5 meters long, so maybe with a leash that long you could stash your drive out of the way somewhere. Chris, the only thing wrong with RAID is that it give you the illusion that you have a backup. You don't. In 25 years I've lost 2 drive controllers, both due to cheap fans that died. The drives themselves were fine (but recovering the data on a drive whose controller has died is challenging). If you have a data center with 1000s of drives spinning 24/365 you can expect to have a few drives crash per month. A home user may never see one. It just isn't the problem you need to solve. All I was saying to Christopher is that he could use all 2 TB before he bothers buying another gizmo.

... you should be getting great sound from the PRE and your Mac. Try a simple iMac (with music files on the internal drive) -> USB -> PRE -> Amp setup, without all your complexities, and make sure you have that working. It should sound mahvalous. Then keep adding the rest of the system in until it breaks.

Let's talk about your storage a little bit. I found your RAID box here. If I'm reading it correctly, it's a simple 2 drive external hard drive enclosure with 1394 and RAID support. You don't need RAID. Neither do the rest of us. RAID is not a backup. The least likely thing to go wrong with your storage is a drive failure, which is the only think RAID protects you from. There's nothing wrong with RAID, but it's not really doing anything for you. It looks like it supports "Spanning mode", which would let you use all 2 TB. I think JBOD would let you use all 2 TB also. Point being, before you shell out money for some other gizmo, you could just use all the storage you already have. You also need a backup solution. 1 TB should hold in the neighbourhood of 2000 uncompressed 16/44.1 CDs. That should let you plan your storage requirements. That is probably the first thing you should figure out. I just bought (and am waiting for delivery) of an allegedly quiet, low-power-consumption 1 TB hard drive with a (single drive) external enclosure that supports eSATA and USB 2.0. Total cost: $125. Seriously, this stuff is dirt cheap now. Multiple-drive enclosures are more expensive per drive, since they generally provide RAID controllers. I bet you could just swap out the 1 TB drives for a couple of 2 TB drives and it would just work. 2T drives are still pretty pricey, at $300 each. 1.5 TB drives are $130-$160 each. The drive spin-down issue is a real drag. I would contact the manufacturer and see if there is a setting to keep them spun up. The noisy fan - probably not a lot you can do about it at this point. Since it's a 1U case, it is probably a small (40 mm or so) fan, and they have to run fast to move enough air, and fast = noisy.

... the labels for the selected source beside the blue LEDs.

"There’s an enormous value in having a relationship with your fans," he says. "More value even than in selling your records."

The DAC1 PRE has those, indicating which input is selected. The only differences I see in the faceplate between this and the PRE is the shape of the two cutouts and the dot that Chris mentioned.

High Definition Resampler? Hot Damn, Rita! High Dose Radiation? Hyper Dimensional Resonator?