NAS Advice

I do detect petulance and a hissy fit here. You know nothing about me and my motivation or my situation. I wanted to know what specifically worked for people to stream music. I was advised to chose Synology or QNAP. I chose QNAP. I was advised to buy iX. QNAP only offered i3 in 4 bay in an older enclosure architecture. I5 only came in 6 bays that I didn’t need. Celeron would be fine with NVME caching to speed things up. Points taken and evaluated. I agree that the Black Drives are not ideal, they would work. I can’t get golds from our supplier right now. They have reds that are NAS specific. I may swap them tomorrow but they are a slower drive. Bonus is that they are much cheaper.

I think that I’m capable enough to figure this out. IT is not strange to me! Three weeks ago we moved one of our businesses. 120 people and 25,000 square feet plus equipment and this is the server room and we strung 350,000 ft of ethernet.

I do not lash out at people if they do not please me. I guess that it’s very lonely at the top!

No one lashed out at you. I just wondered why you bothered to ask if you were going to ignore everyone’s advice and then make your choices public. The Red Pro is just as fast as the Black. Good luck with your configuration. I hope it all works out as you desire.

I’m perplexed at what advice I ignored? I was told to buy a 6 bay QNAP with an i5 and that didn’t work for me. If I don’t follow your recommendation to a “T” I’m somehow wasting everyone’s time by participating in this forum?

I participate in this forum and others to be in a community of like minded people with a passion for our mutual interests. Remember that!

I have a QNAP running Minim server and Esoteric Soundstream, and that seems to work OK. Not easy to pick whether playing the Sonoma series one download stored on the QNAP compared to DirecStream Memory Player spinning the SACD.

The QNAP was not purchased for the purpose of storing music. For that I use something else.

I see no point in perpetuating this discussion. Good luck with getting your set up up and running.

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If performance is the goal (and know some IT) then I’d go for pc/server (i9/ryzen/xeon - 32/64GB - NVMe SSDs/PCIe SSDs) hardware and virtualize everything. For example, install Proxmox and different virtual machines for FreeNAS/NAS4Free/OMV, Roon/HQPlayer, Linux/Windows/MacOS etc. Choose a good PCIe raid controller and make a passthrough to FreeNAS. Same goes for LAN cards. I have built it for myself and I’m in testing phase. Everything looks good so far, uptime with no problems ~90 days. And of course LANRover/NAA from server to DAC. :slight_smile:

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Sounds like a lot of effort, which I might understand as this is a hobby. But really, doesn’t buying a box off the shelf that works appeal to you?

Yes, it’s a lot of work to put one together and the learning curve to configure it, is more that I care to get involved with. I have a custom desktop that I use and it had the most features and performance at a price that beat the OEM’s hands down. It’s just big. I have space limitations and a wife that grumbles at technology slowly taking over the house. Yes it’s going to have a strong performance/price ratio but there’s a lot to say for an out of the box simplified solution.

I far prefer the off-the-shelf box that works. No need for unproductive down-time trying to work out how to make it work = more time to enjoy it working.

Just like you said “another off the shelf box”. I have like 10 different these “boxes” and 10-15 wall warts generating noise to my home power lines and silently eating money. I really want to get rid of these. Also these cheaper off the self boxes are not so good with multiple users. So great all-in-one solution is a home server and virtualize everything: Router, firewall, NAS, audio player, video player, work desktop etc. And yes, it’s a hobby and a day job for me. For a regular audiophile the off the shelf box is more than enough.

Good grief Houston, we have a problem! Reduce those 10 different boxes to the five important ones, none of which need wall warts.

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Sorry about the offtopic!

The thing is, all are important. My goal is no wall warts. Big transformer (or two) with multiple outputs for different devices (chargers, clocks, stb etc.) I have already made few low noise linear power supplies for my audio gear (raspberrys, sparkys, lanrover) which is my priority. :slight_smile:

Closest to sofa for example:

I’m getting an HDPlex 200 watt Linear Supply. It has multiple outlets and gives better regulated power. It’s larger but it will hide behind the rack and the wall warts will be gone.

I have only but one wall wart. It charges up my battery powered WiFi remote. 10-15 wall warts is just insane.

The QNAP configuration could certainly be made more user friendly. There were some moments laden with expletives. However, the NAS story has come to a happy place. I now have a QNAP TS-453B configured as a ROON Server. It has two Western Digital Red 6TB drives in a Raid 1 Configuration. In the M.2 slots I have two 500GB Samsung Evo NVME drives configured as a Raid 0 (I didn’t need error correction). Speed was a factor here. These drives function as SSD cache and they move regularly used files/apps onto the high speed SSD’s. The NAS only has a Celeron Processor but the only time it was a pain was when it was building and copying the database of music to the drives. It was 2.85 TB’s so there was a lot of data. It took about 24 hours. Now, when I access the NAS over ethernet, from my music room, it takes about a second to find and to start playing the selected music. This is faster than the DAS that I had connected before. All in all a good response. The NAS is in my office and is very quiet. The only time you can hear it is when the Rotating drives are accessed. Once the data is loaded into the SSD’s it’s completely silent. I’m just ripping and loading more disks onto the NAS this weekend.

Sounds complicated. But if you’ve got the complicated to be simple that is a credit to you!

I’ve used a QNAP212 for some years running Minimserver. This has provided excellent sound in my continually evolving system. However I never use RAID, hate the ext file formats, slow backups, and the low spec computer the QNAP actually is.

I’m building a tricked-out windows music server to replace it. This is an i5, windows 2016 server core, ssd, AudiophileOptimizer, Fidelizer, low noise power supplies.

I’d also like to find a replacement for Minimserver that doesn’t need to transcode flac or dsd to wav/dopwav as I think the DirectStream will do this better.