NAS for Music Servers

[Kal Rubinson]

Moving files to / from the NAS is slow, which I do frequently. And the files are big. I also use the my NAS for another application, which aggravates my speed concerns.

Agreed but that is a function separate from music playing which is not so constrained.

 

[PatentLawyer]

Agreed but that is a function separate from music playing which is not so constrained.

Well, true, but the files have to get on the NAS somehow. And since I have four systems for which I have to replicate my music library onto external drives, the speed thing is a big deal for my use case. And I’m impatient!!

 

[Prana Ferox]

Beyond the scope but if you are doing non-music stuff that requires moving files quickly you're more likely to be limited by the storage subsystems on either end. It's pretty hard to saturate even 1gb Ethernet with spinning rust drives. Generally in the home the key for large file transfers is just to do it while you're doing something else so you're not waiting (or at a time you aren't even there). If you need a serious business network for actual work you can use professional networking hardware that can be acquired affordably on the used market; I'd point you down the rabbit hole of ServeTheHome (that link and the rest of that forum.)

 

[PatentLawyer]

Beyond the scope but if you are doing non-music stuff that requires moving files quickly you're more likely to be limited by the storage subsystems on either end. It's pretty hard to saturate even 1gb Ethernet with spinning rust drives. Generally in the home the key for large file transfers is just to do it while you're doing something else so you're not waiting (or at a time you aren't even there). If you need a serious business network for actual work you can use professional networking hardware that can be acquired affordably on the used market; I'd point you down the rabbit hole of ServeTheHome (that link and the rest of that forum.)

Thanks for that lead! No spinning rust on my primary network, and definitely limited by the network. I will leave it there as you‘re right that it’s beyond the scope.

 

[mrbungle]

Just use one of your Pis as the NAS for the other, seems a lot of expense to go to, to get not much more.

Here a tutorial: https://www.ricmedia.com/raspi/build-a-raspberry-pi-nas-server

I followed his old tutorial (Post in thread 'Show us your Raspberry PIs, Intel NUCs and other mini PCs!'
https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...el-nucs-and-other-mini-pcs.35967/post-1258280), building a raid with mdadm and samba and it’s been running for over a year with literally 0 issues. Save the money and use some of it for cloud storage. Chances are high, if you really need a powerful dedicated NAS, you would know.

 

[GXAlan]

Thanks for that lead! No spinning rust on my primary network, and definitely limited by the network. I will leave it there as you‘re right that it’s beyond the scope.

You should really consider upgrading to 5GbE or 10GbE. It solves the problem you describe. 10GbE is more sensitive to cables, though for residential distances Cat5e is probably good enough. The smaller switches are fanless. I am anti SSD write cache due to the consequences in reliability for Synology. The performance gains weighed against the resiliency risks are not worth it to me.

 

[bluefuzz]

I used an old HP microserver running OpenMediaVault for many years. When that grew too old and decrepit I 'upgraded' to a QNAP 4 x 6TB NAS with 2 x Nvme cache and full RAID. It's certainly faster than the HP and seems stable enough but the OS contains a lot of cruft and is very locked down. Were I to start over I would probably go back to OMV.

Whatever you do don't use WD-Red disks in a RAID configuration. WD changed the spec of these disks (without telling anyone) to SMR-technology which means they are essentially useless for RAID.

 

[Bob from Florida]

Appreciate all the replies. The main reasons for picking a NAS rather than share the Pi drive is running it at least as a RAID in mirror mode to allow recovery in case of a single drive failure. Also, photos and other files would be on the NAS as well plus I would use an external SSD as a backup of the NAS. I do not want to leave my main computer on all the time for drive sharing, hence the separate NAS. Much of the research I have done seems to point towards NAS certified drives as preferred. SSD’s will not add any noise so I am leaning towards them. I already use a SSD on my stereo rack with a Pi 4 in a passive cooled case - so that is dead silent. The NAS will be in my office and while it will have a cooling fan, I am looking for that fan to be relatively quiet. The last time I rebuilt my main tower computer the new case fans and the overkill power supply I put in that case are almost silent when spinning. Compared to previous builds this one is not a contributor to background noise.

 

[mrbungle]

Appreciate all the replies. The main reasons for picking a NAS rather than share the Pi drive is running it at least as a RAID in mirror mode to allow recovery in case of a single drive failure. Also, photos and other files would be on the NAS as well plus I would use an external SSD as a backup of the NAS. I do not want to leave my main computer on all the time for drive sharing, hence the separate NAS. Much of the research I have done seems to point towards NAS certified drives as preferred. SSD’s will not add any noise so I am leaning towards them. I already use a SSD on my stereo rack with a Pi 4 in a passive cooled case - so that is dead silent. The NAS will be in my office and while it will have a cooling fan, I am looking for that fan to be relatively quiet. The last time I rebuilt my main tower computer the new case fans and the overkill power supply I put in that case are almost silent when spinning. Compared to previous builds this one is not a contributor to background noise.

Fair enough. It’s pretty easy though to setup a RAID on the Pi, especially with software like OpenMediaVault. I have 4 of the same SSDs (1 and 2TB) you linked in a 1+0 RAID, USB 3.0 to SATA cables and USB dock to not rely on the Pi for power.

 

[mrbungle]

Whatever you do don't use WD-Red disks in a RAID configuration. WD changed the spec of these disks (without telling anyone) to SMR-technology which means they are essentially useless for RAID.

I don’t think they introduced the SSD equivalent yet in their Red line, right? That’s what the OP posted.

 

[Bob from Florida]

Fair enough. It’s pretty easy though to setup a RAID on the Pi, especially with software like OpenMediaVault. I have 4 of the same SSDs (1 and 2TB) you linked in a 1+0 RAID, USB 3.0 to SATA cables and USB dock to not rely on the Pi for power.

Turnkey solution with the Pi or something I have to jack around with. Being older and theoretically wiser, I would like to bypass the pain of the more economical solutions if in the end I buy the more expensive solution I could have started with.

 

[Bob from Florida]

I don’t think they introduced the SSD equivalent yet in their Red line, right? That’s what the OP posted.

The link was to a Redline SSD.

 

[Marc v E]

Turnkey solution with the Pi or something I have to jack around with. Being older and theoretically wiser, I would like to bypass the pain of the more economical solutions if in the end I buy the more expensive solution I could have started with.

love it

Synology NAS with ssd's should give you a killer system. Just make sure you check the noise level of the Nas in the specs.

 

[BR52]

I have 873 as well running Roon on it. absolutely no issues.

 

[bluefuzz]

I don’t think they introduced the SSD equivalent yet in their Red line, right? That’s what the OP posted.

Actually I am using WD-Red SSDs (or rather Nvmes) as cache in my QNAP NAS. They are fine. But I was simply warning others about the performance of newer WD-Red spinning disks as they aren't what they used to be. I had originally installed WD-Reds in my NAS and then couldn't understand why it literally took days to resync the RAID. Changed them for Seagate Ironwolfs and the RAID rebuilds in minutes ...

 

[Berwhale]

Personally, I wouldn't run RAID at home. It's a high availability technology, it's not a data protection technology and does not generally provide any additional performance in a home environment. If you don't understand the nuances of RAID and how it interacts with HDDs (CMR vs SMR, etc.) or SSDs (differential writes) it can bite you.

 

[tw99]

Personally, I wouldn't run RAID at home. It's a high availability technology, it's not a data protection technology and does not generally provide any additional performance in a home environment. If you don't understand the nuances of RAID and how it interacts with HDDs (CMR vs SMR, etc.) or SSDs (differential writes) it can bite you.

People always say this... But I'm using a Raid 1 setup on my Synology, on the basis that the most likely failure is that a hard drive dies. When that happens, it all keeps running and I seamlessly swap in another blank drive. I keep backups as well of course.

 

[mrbungle]

People always say this... But I'm using a Raid 1 setup on my Synology, on the basis that the most likely failure is that a hard drive dies. When that happens, it all keeps running and I seamlessly swap in another blank drive. I keep backups as well of course.

Accidental deletion due to user error and malware are probably more likely these days. Raid I guess increases the former chances a bit. So @Berwhale ’s point is valid, it’s not a backup replacement with limited benefit at home. I personally still went with it because it’s relatively cheap and I too have other levels of backup.

 

[Berwhale]

RAID1 is fine and you sensibly have a backup. It's people that run RAID5 without understanding what they are getting into that I worry about.

I ran servers at home with RAID5 between 1999 and 2014 until I got an Unrecoverable Read Error during a rebuild after a drive failure. I was incredibly unlucky to have this happen, but i'd have to be even more unlucky with my current setup.

Schemes like Erasure Coding have replacing RAID in the enterprise storage world. The Dell Powerstore arrays that i'm about to order 3PB (petabytes) of in my day job use something Dell call DRE.

 

[Marc v E]

Accidental deletion due to user error and malware are probably more likely these days. Raid I guess increases the former chances a bit. So @Berwhale ’s point is valid, it’s not a backup replacement with limited benefit at home. I personally still went with it because it’s relatively cheap and I too have other levels of backup.

When you think about it, it would make more sense to have an automated backup at another location, say at your parents' house. Or to the cloud. And skip raid.

Iirc Apple NAS systems only have 1 drive. A big plus ime is that the synchronisation is seamless and backups easily restored.

( I suspect many on windows pcs delay their backups or don't do them at all. In which case a wake up call by 1 or 2 drives failing and data being preserved by raid configuration can be a life saver.)