Well said.
I have paid roughly $3k for every high performance consumer grade PC I have purchased since the late ‘70’s.
Today’s tech buries everything before it and is a bargain by any measure.
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I used to have the Cloud storage that cae with the NUC Pc, it went horribly wrong a couple of weeks ago. I eventually uninstalled it, and used the back up from my portable drive (not the NAS tho, as it was to slow a process for some reason)
I’ve decided to give Nas drive another go at it. Last time was a Synology 720+ and while it was good, the sound quality was not up to par to a Samsung 8T SSD drive fed via USB to streamer. But loading time on the app was subpar compared with NAS. I just bought a SSD NAS because it might sound better than HDD drives and certainly less mechanical noise. Will report back when I get it in a couple of days.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CRKHQ56W/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
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Please let us know what you find. I’ve been using a Synology NAS for years and have recently been wondering whether I should move from mechanical drives up to solid state ones.
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Forget it, stick with your Synology, the SSD NAS was not designed for audio playback and there’s a $49 a month fee to use their sysyem. I’ll have to keep looking for one that does work for audio playback. I have returned the unit.
Thanks! I can keep my current Synology NAS and replace the spinning discs with SSD. Some people claim that has produced better sound quality for them, but I’m still on the fence about whether I want to spend the money to find out if this would work in my system.
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When I was using an SSD drive in my Grimm MU1 lots of folks yelled “Build a NAS!”. When I built the NAS with conventional hard drives everyone said “use an internal SSD!”. Bah.
I do not believe there can be enough of an improvement building a NAS from SSDs to offset the vast difference in price. In a few years that difference will shrink.
I think the only good reason to build a NAS using only SSDs is that it would be badass. So masterbateory.
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A HHD NAS is fine, but besides the sound quality, I want to get away from the heat, the noise from spinning at 7200 rpm, and the buzzing off the cooling fan if I can do without it. The loading of the album covers on the app on startup is quicker with NAS. SSD through USB is ok, but I just wish it was faster.
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There’s lots of good advice up the thread, but I violate almost all of it but still get good sound. I have no real point here, except possibly that you can make anything work well. I don’t recommend any of this except for masochists.
I’ve always had my NAS only connected to the rest of the network wirelessly with a 5Gb router. Never any problems.
I have my music both on the NAS and on a ReFS storage space hooked to my laptop using USB to 7 5T USB SSDs. My DAC is also on the same USB tree as the drives. With either the NAS or the USB drives using Foobar2000 I never get ticks or pauses even when the NAS has spun down the disk drives - I just have Foobar set to buffer 20 seconds of audio and that works fine.
I do have to have my NAS in another room, far, far away to dampen its noise.
The 5T Samsung T9 USB SSDs do draw a lot of current so it took some time to find a USB hub that didn’t glitch when I stress test the setup. But with storage spaces set for 3 way mirroring the glitches never caused a problem or caused any down time.
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I just bought a Western Digital Black 8TB M2 drive for my PC. I have 3 M2 drives in it. For the first time ever I have a desktop computer with no conventional hard drives.
It is smooth like babies feet.
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I agree Ted. I’m at a point with my NAS where I need to think about increasing the storage capacity. It’s an 8-bay Synology device based on 3.6TB HDDs configured as a single RAID5 volume of 25.4TB capacity. It’s at just over 80% used space. I’ve no compelling argument for either HDD or SSD. They have about the same reliability and life span specs but I just like SSDs. 
Given that my Synology model only takes 2.5" or 3.5" profile discs, I’ve been looking at the Samsung 8TB 2.5" profile SSD. Haven’t quite decided yet because, in Aus at least, they’re around $A900 each! So 8 of those babies would be pretty pricey. OTOH, it should satisfy my storage needs until I fall off my twig. The NAS has 1Gb LAN connections and is loafing along even when spitting out the higher resolution DSD files either via Minim Server/Streamer or as raw files for other consumers.
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I’d never heard that before, it’s great 
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About 3 years ago I bought and built a synology nas with HDDs to replace my SSD based nuc and it sounded absolutely horrible, sounded very bright. I’ve not switched it on since. There is a slot to add buffered memory, maybe that would improve things. Replacing vibrating HDDs with silent, vibration free SSDs would help, who knows!, I don’t.
I have an M2 drive on the input and output of my NAS with spinning hard drives. If it has a sound I am unaware of it. Interesting.
I am using Seagate 16TB IronWolf Pro drives. They were pricey but cheap compared to SSD. I run RAID6. The NAS is in a separate room from my listening room.
I wish you could stop by and listen to see if you hear the same thing with my NAS!
*or maybe not lol.
I’d love to pop over, but flight costs would be a bit high (for me anyway) from the uk 
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I could probably ship you the NAS. But if you were smart you would keep it.
I almost tried NAS, but then decided to use a Samsung T7 SSD with a Nordost Frey USB cable for my Lumin U2. The setup was just much simpler.
I used the same setup with Grimm MU2 for a couple of weeks, then moved all my files into its internal drive. I was surprised how much better doing this way. The term “a veil is removed” is used often to describe black background. There is no other descriptions fit more of what improvement I heard!
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That is a very kind offer, which of course would be wrong of me to accept. I have continuous tinnitus these days anyway so don’t play that much real music anymore.
Sadly, I have tinnitus pretty bad myself. Sigh.
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Mine’s like a hissing sound in both ears, a bit like the noise you have with waxy ears, but without the sound loss… … or the wax
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