The advantages of a NAS?

[joes1234]

1)Just wondering of the advantages of a NAS besides being another " bank vault" in which to store my music files, if my comp would crash and It needed repair. If that were to happen I could conceivably just connect a USB cable to my from the NAS to my DAC and I should be fine, right?

 

2)Does it matter which NAS I buy?

 

3)Is it just a matter of TB storage space?

 

[nbpf]

17 minutes ago, joes1234 said:

1)Just wondering of the advantages of a NAS besides being another " bank vault" in which to store my music files, if my comp would crash and It needed repair. If that were to happen I could conceivably just connect a USB cable to my from the NAS to my DAC and I should be fine, right?

 

2)Does it matter which NAS I buy?

 

3)Is it just a matter of TB storage space?

 

For serving music files on a LAN, a NAS is neither necessary nor particularly useful. Direct attached storage is more flexible and more convenient, in my view.  

[davide256]

Running a NAS can mean  your PC and its storage are free to do other things and that everyone in the home will have easy access 7x24 to the files. Its not a PC backup solution because network speeds are slower than USB 3.0 transfer to a hard drive.  I used to use a NAS  for UPNP music playback but Roon core requires the horsepower of a typical PC so my files are back on the PC as Roon server and the NAS now has all my ripped videos

[One and a half]

Two posts in the negative, now the third. 

 

I found disk access very slow, the drives take time to spin up, and the reliability of the RAID or duplicate drives is the same as there is for a standalone PC. The power consumption was nothing to rite home about either, the current XEON 32GB tower server draws 1/2 the power than the NAS.

No advantages were heard when using the NAS, plus the updates took forever, and a full dinner meal can be prepared in the time it takes to update and reboot.

The apps with the OS make it look like a mobile phone, bloatware city. The 'advantages' of low power device are offset by the usability and frustration. 

 

For attached hard drives is an open discussion. If the PC music server is only used when needed, a portable hard drive works OK. I found most of not all portable USB type drives, even the metal clad types that left on 24/7 tend to cook the hard drives and either the controller inside the drive failed or the drive failed. It is also not so easy to find an enterprise 24/7 drive inside an off the shelf portable drive from say WD. A larger case offers better cooling and allows the use of 6GB or more enterprise drives which are designed for 24/7 use.

 

As always a backup of the music in another two places is highly recommended.

[jventer]

I do not disagree with the previous responses.

IMO - in hifi and in computer worlds it all comes down to personal circumstances and budget.

I actually use local attached storage and a NAS. Local storage: some are connected 24/7 and others not.

The reason I am doing both is that:

1. I have lots of hard drives available and I listen to music in various locations and take stuff to work and to GTG's. 

2. I have about 6TB of music, all of it  just does not fit that well on local storage. And I cant afford cloud storage of all.

So, on my NAS I have everything, as in music, photos, personal stuff and kid's stuff. That gets backed up so we have no chance of losing things. The various local drives are for convenience and (maybe) better quality.

My advice is to investigate the options available and design a solution that fits your personal circumstances.

Whatever you do, make sure you have backups as hard drives fail.

Enjoy!

[DaQi]

Wow, amazed at these responses. Advantages of a NAS depend on the use case. If you only ever listen to your digital music while sitting at your computer then you don't need a NAS true enough. But...

• A NAS means you don't need to have your computer on or dedicate your computer to playing or serving music files. 
• A NAS means that anyone on your network can also listen to those music files.
• A NAS also allows you to have videos stored on it that you can then watch from any machine in the house.
• A NAS with multiple drives is going to be more fault tolerant than a single attached drive. As pointed out though it is not a back-up - you need to back your music up somewhere else.
• A NAS can easily support multiple music streams across a gigabit ethernet connection. 
• A NAS is also useful for storing large sets of files that you can't fit on your computer and would otherwise have used a USB drive for. While ethernet is not as fast as a fast USB connection it is plenty fast for most storage type uses. 
• A NAS can be set up as a personal cloud and you can access your content from anywhere. I haven't done this but it is possible and not that difficult to do. 

I have a house with kids, a wired and wireless network, multiple TVs, computers and the NAS is great as movies are on there, my music is on there, my photos are on there and I can access it throughout the house. The box itself sits in a cupboard (with external exhaust fan) in my garage where my wired network hub is so I don't see or hear it. I have two NAS boxes that have been running almost continuously for 10 years and other than 1 disk failure very early on (no data lost due to the RAID configuration) they have run completely problem free. Ethernet is plenty fast for streaming music and for streaming movies as well. I use Sonos boxes throughout the house for distributed music that are all playing music from the NAS. For my use case I can't imagine not having it. 

[DavidL]

After 5 years of NAS use I can endorse DaQi's 'Pros'. The only 'Con' that has surfaced so far for me is the power of the processor in my Synology DS412+. I run MinimServer on the NAS and find that the time MinimServer takes to list a genre of albums from my library (currently 96k tracks) to my control point (Android tablet running BubbleUPnP) is a second or two, not instantaneous as it would be via a PC processor. I can live with this as the power of processors installed on a NAS has increased considerably since 2012, to cope with streaming HD video, so I reckon when I come to replace my NAS box this response should be much quicker. (At that stage it may even be possible run Roon on a NAS processor!)

 

I store both the music media and associated metadata in iTunes format on the NAS to avoid any loss of synchronisation between the two which might occur if one was on the computer and the other on the NAS. Until I updated to High Sierra and its new file system I found that editing metadata in the iTunes library could be slow but this delay has now largely disappeared, presumably because of the disk buffering implementation with APFS on the High Sierra OS.

 

[plissken]

On 6/29/2018 at 6:15 PM, nbpf said:

For serving music files on a LAN, a NAS is neither necessary nor particularly useful. Direct attached storage is more flexible and more convenient, in my view.  

 

Last I checked doing 24 or 36TB of DAS is not optimal in the room you are listening in.

[plissken]

If you've a large library, multiple end points (I have a 2.0 machine, HTPC, XBox 1, laptop, office machine), I fail to see how a NAS isn't a requirement. 

 

Most NAS boxed are built on lower power hardware so they are more energy efficient too.

[Doak]

On 6/29/2018 at 5:15 PM, nbpf said:

For serving music files on a LAN, a NAS is neither necessary nor particularly useful. Direct attached storage is more flexible and more convenient, in my view.  

+++ DAS sound better.

Simpler is better .... as long as it works (for you). 

[nbpf]

5 hours ago, plissken said:

 

Last I checked doing 24 or 36TB of DAS is not optimal in the room you are listening in.

What does it mean to be optimal in this context? Who needs 24TB of music data?

[Fitzcaraldo215]

4 minutes ago, nbpf said:

What does it mean to be optimal in this context? Who needs 24TB of music data?

I do, more in fact.  I have > 40 TB of music files and videos.  It's big because they are mostly Mch SACDs and videos.  Few are CDs or stereo.  I have 54TB on 13x4TB drives, but I am considering a new, second NAS at 8x8TBs, with optional expansion to 18 drives.

 

I do not use multipoint access.  Nontheless, I prefer having my files stored with RAID to help ensure against possible disc failures.  I will likely shift from RAID 5 to 6.   And, yes, there is also offsite backup.

 

I formerly used an 8 drive JBOD cabinet, but the NAS with Raid just is not that much more costly, considering.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[bixby]

1.  Yes you could just add a piece of sw to play your files to a nas in the event of computer failure, assuming th eos supports it.  But an older Win computer can make a great nas and the benefit with a good revealing system is that the delivery to a player computer via ethernet usually wins out SQ wise over any direct attached storage IMHO.  So benefit is better sound via ethernet file delivery to your player computer and one less thing on your usb bus if that is how the digital gets to your dac.

 

2.   It may depend on which NAS.  Why spend for overpriced low power nas when a simple win 10 box can share a drive to the network.  I did that for years in two systems,  Total cost  minus usb drive was about $150 per computer used.

 

3.  Space is cheap now.  I use a shared drive on my workaday computer that is 4TB.  I only have about 1.5TB of music, but I dedicate a player computer for main listening.  I think this is a key to very good SQ.  Using a machine that you use for serious music listening for everything else is not the best.

 

good luck!

[plissken]

5 hours ago, nbpf said:

What does it mean to be optimal in this context? Who needs 24TB of music data?

 

Lets think about this: Anywhere from 4-8 drives, all spinning, making R/W access noise, in an enclosure with proper wattage and cooling for the drives and power supply.

 

Does that sound optimal to you to be placed in the listening environment?

[Ralf11]

6 minutes ago, plissken said:

 

Lets think about this: Anywhere from 4-8 drives, all spinning, making R/W access noise, in an enclosure with proper wattage and cooling for the drives and power supply.

 

Does that sound optimal to you to be placed in the listening environment?

 

yup - I'd put it somewhere else...

[kennyb123]

A few NAS advantages:

 

The ability to  “hot swap” a failed drive.  If a single drive fails, my music will still be served up by the three drive volume, so no disruption to listening while waiting for the replacement drive.  No need to even shut down the NAS to swap drives.

 

Easy volume expansion.  I started with a pair of 3TB drives.  Then added another and my volume expanded.  Then added another,  One failed, so in its place I swapped in a 4TB drive.  Then swapped in another 4TB drive and my volume expanded again.  (I stupidly purchased Seagate drives initially.  All four of them failed.  I replaced these with WD Red, which have been far more reliable.). I got up to four 4TB drive, but have been running out of space.  A couple days ago purchased a used 5-bay Synology NAS.  It was easy to swap the four drives from my 4-bay NAS over to it - and then add a fifth.  (The new NAS is more powerful, so I can run Plex on it - which I intend to do - another plus).

 

 

[ElviaCaprice]

I've never found the need for a NAS or it's benefits, which are far and few over a DAS.  Plus a properly set up DAS is better for SQ, in my opinion.  The benefits of simplicity/storage/software of a DAS far outweigh a NAS..  Keeping it simple!!!

[R1200CL]

20 hours ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

I do, more in fact.  I have > 40 TB of music files and videos.  It's big because they are mostly Mch SACDs and videos.  Few are CDs or stereo.  I have 54TB on 13x4TB drives, but I am considering a new, second NAS at 8x8TBs, with optional expansion to 18 drives.

 

I do not use multipoint access.  Nontheless, I prefer having my files stored with RAID to help ensure against possible disc failures.  I will likely shift from RAID 5 to 6.   And, yes, there is also offsite backup.

 

I formerly used an 8 drive JBOD cabinet, but the NAS with Raid just is not that much more costly, considering.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You need a Jottacloud account ?

[R1200CL]

On 6/29/2018 at 11:50 PM, joes1234 said:

1)Just wondering of the advantages of a NAS besides being another " bank vault" in which to store my music files, if my comp would crash and It needed repair. If that were to happen I could conceivably just connect a USB cable to my from the NAS to my DAC and I should be fine, right?

 

2)Does it matter which NAS I buy?

 

3)Is it just a matter of TB storage space?

 

 

 

If you decided to buy a NAS, you would benefit from a Qnap. 

 

Excellent support. Many updates and functions. Can use Roon. 

 

If not decided. Load everything to Jottacloud, and use cheap large spinning disk locally. 

 

Meaning it doesn’t matter if you loose data. 

Be avare of the difference between sync and backup. 

[plissken]

7 hours ago, ElviaCaprice said:

I've never found the need for a NAS or it's benefits, which are far and few over a DAS.  Plus a properly set up DAS is better for SQ, in my opinion.  The benefits of simplicity/storage/software of a DAS far outweigh a NAS..  Keeping it simple!!!

 

And the minute you share out a folder..... You've a NAS. 

[jabbr]

I have 8 media devices scattered around my house that benefit from shared NAS storage in the same way that they benefit from shared internet access.

[Fitzcaraldo215]

2 hours ago, jabbr said:

I have 8 media devices scattered around my house that benefit from shared NAS storage in the same way that they benefit from shared internet access.

Your case for NAS is clear.  But, even I prefer a NAS feeding just one device because it quietly in another room simply mangages my hard drives, diagnoses impending failure and is potentially fault tolerant via drive swaps, yet I need pay little attention to it.  It just works, and it was easily set up without a nest of cables as one big 54TB (minus RAID overhead) volume on 13 physical drives.  

 

I used a Synology 1813+, with 8 drives.  Later, I added a 5 drive expansion unit easy as pie.  I could add another 5 drive expansion.  But, likely, I will do a Synology 1817+ with 8 TB drives in RAID 6, using the older unit for regular backup.  That, too, can be easily expanded with 2x5 drive units.

 

I started with storing videos on 6-8 2TB drives using an EZ Dock to swap them one at a time, each for a specific genre.  There were drive failures, most likely due to handling.  Then, I graduated to an 8 drive cabinet configured as JBOD, because the RAID support looked mighty  poor.  And, management of the capacity limits of 8 drives individually was no fun.  

 

The next step was to NAS, and also to the use of superior NAS spec, rather than desktop spec, hard drives.  It has been a pleasure and a relief with many fewer hassles, and much greater peace of mind.  When your library grows into the many TBs, you need all the reliability and ease of use you can get.  NAS provides that better than anything else.

 

I realize you can roll your own NAS on an old PC.  But, life is too short for me to want to deal with that.  It is a waste of precious time when I could be just relaxing to some music or videos.

 

No doubt, I use only a tiny fraction of its features, but I have no regrets at all about the relatively minor amount of money spent on NAS hardware.  It is trivial, really.

 

 

 

 

[Dan Gravell]

Generally I'd argue for a NAS on the basis of manageability, but it's a strange one; while it makes storage and music library management more manageable, having the extra device adds a management problem of its own, in the sense you have more electronics just to worry about. But if you end up duplicating that anyway in direct attached storage... back to a NAS!

 

What you absolutely do not want is duplication of (in use, not backup) music files. If you do have that, you have to be very careful about how you manage it.

 

Personally I build my own.

[audiventory]

On 6/30/2018 at 12:50 AM, joes1234 said:

Just wondering of the advantages of a NAS besides being another " bank vault" in which to store my music files, if my comp would crash and It needed repair.

 

First, I'd pay main attention to electrical energy consuming of NAS.

 

It is online permanently.

[DaQi]

7 hours ago, audiventory said:

 

First, I'd pay main attention to electrical energy consuming of NAS.

 

It is online permanently.

You can configure most of them to spin down drives and go into a sleep mode based on time of day to help address the electrical energy use issue.