icevic

Lssnr; There are two levels of backup you should consider. The first is an onsite backup, basically a copy of your hard drive to protect from a hard drive failure. Hard drives tend to fail and then all your music is gone. You may still have all your CDs, which is a form of backup, but all your downloads are gone and then there is the work of re-importing CDs. The second is an offsite backup. This is basically another copy of your hard drive that you store somewhere else and update occasionally. It can be as simple as a drive copy that you leave at someone else's house, or as sophisticated as a cloud backup service. This is an optional level of backup, once you have the onsite backup. It protects you against fire, theft, accidents, or water damage: accidents that could potentially wipe our your primary hard drive and the onsite backup. This gives you more protection that you had with CDs. You have a ton of storage, almost 10TB. Maybe you have that much music, or maybe you have a lot of duplicates: you should check. Because if you actually have 10TB of music (that's almost 20,000 CDs, which is possible but definitely on the high end) then you will need some serious storage to back it up. If it is mostly duplicates and open space, consider buying a pair of 5TB drives. Consolidate on one, and use the other as a backup. Just copy and paste once a month or so, that's the simplest way. To be really sure buy a third and rotate it out of your office or somewhere else, and you have both offsite and onsite backups. If you do need 10GB then you will have to with a multi-disk enclosure with some sort of RAID. There are lots of ways to do this - Google will sell you any number of them at any price you want to pay. Some of then are Airplay or DLNA enabled network devices, some just connect to your computer. Your choice - and wallet. I could explain RAID 5 to you but Google does it quicker. Creating an offsite backup will be a problem with that much data. A multi-disk enclosure might be your best bet, but it will be awkward. You can also use Crashplan, a subscription service. Crashplan does both onsite and offsite, and does it all automatically. It creates a copy to the cloud, and also lets you use a local disk to store backups there as well. It's slow to upload and if you have upload limits on your internet connection you will incur some costs, and also in case of data loss restoring 10TB of data will take weeks, but at least it is safe. You can restore it anywhere, any time, so even if you are on vacation you could access your music (to download). So bottom line, whatever storage your music takes, plan on buying at least that much storage again for backup, and possibly a third for offsite or use Crashplan.

There are Ravenna enabled DACs? I didn't realize. Well that's exactly what we are talking about then! Ravenna wins. It's not bus level like iSCSI, but it's audio specific and supports all standards. You'll need a card or device at each end but that was always going to be needed.

Don't forget you want something quiet. SSD has the advantage there. Lots of enclosures have fans and some drives are fairly noisy. Well, noisy enough that if you are in a quiet room listening to music with quiet passages, you would hear it.

This is the start of this thread: "Is anyone using a solution whereby the music source output ( computer, NAS, renderer, etc.) is going into a DAC via an ethernet connection?" So that's the game we're playing. The digital audio source is on the network and the digital-audio decoding is done on an ethernet-connected DAC, which doesn't yet exist. There are lots of ethernet-based music players, which have DACs. Heck most smartphones would qualify. But there are no DACs which operate directly over ethernet (instead of USB, for example), and I am not sure why we would need them anyway. Maybe just to give you a DAC with the option to use either connected directly to your computer or in a different room, so if you moved your laptop to another room you could still play music with it to your stereo without moving your DAC. But it's a game so I am playing along and suggested that iSCSI is the best suited ethernet-based protocol because it is a bus protocol over TCP. You would need a transport-level protocol so you aren't climbing up the TCP/IP stack to the application layer, at which point you have essentially have a network device with an integrated DAC, and not just a DAC alone. You couldn't plug that into your USB port and use it as a DAC. A theorectical DAC which supported iSCSI and USB could do both.

DACs are bus-level devices. UPnP is a network protocol, so it wouldn't be useful to directly connect a DAC, which is the whole point of this discussion. You would need a network device of some type and the DAC would connect to your network device. It could be one box and look like a network DAC but it wouldn't be, it would be a network device with a DAC. iSCSI is a bus-level protocol that works over TCP using existing ethernet hardware, so from that position it has potential. I remember using CD players over SCSI (not iSCSI) so it should be possible. But then, your computer would need to support SCSI! So not so easy because your average PC or Apple doesn't have it off the shelf. I mean, it supports it, but you would have to add a card. Really, a network device with a DAC is a much easier solution.

I think the most promising avenue for a DAC over LAN is adapting iSCSI: it's an open, bus-level protocol that works decently over TCP and can use existing LAN cabling and hardware. I don't know of any existing audio components so that would be a new use case, since it is mainly just storage right now, but SCSI inherently supports a wide variety of devices and could be adapted for DAC. You would have to deal with drivers, but that's life. I think the last thing we need is another standard. that just fragments and divides the market, preventing widespread adoption. iSCSI is a widely accepted standard and it would be better to work within that framework.

Most of these external CD drives are essentially disposable, and priced accordingly. Have you tried buying more than one? Depending on the software you can copy multiple CDs in parallel. That will save time. The Mac SuperDrive is anything but super.