I’ve got a bunch of drives feeding a Mac Mini that contain all my music files. I’m starting to find the constant whirring of the drives annoying. Wondering what other folks do.
Set up a NAS and have the NAS in another room. The bonus is the potential to be configured for redundancy of your files.
8TB usb drive for complete back up
4 TB usb drive I mail around
1 TB usb drive I carry back and forth to CA used at audiophile friends house to listen to hi res files
1TB SSD inside Nucleus+; change content from time to time, going to 4TB SSD soon… library is over 2.5TB in 6 months
MSI gaming Laptop (multiple 1TB SSDs) hooked to network used to control content and convert SACD (iso) to dsf after I rip them w/ Oppo 103
This… My Synology NAS is in one of the bedrooms along with the cable modem and wifi router. It’s running two 6TB drives running in Raid 1, so same exact files on both drives. On top of that, I have two WD 4TB Passport drives. One is yet another copy of my music files, the other is photos, software, etc, etc.
Thanks. I’ll look into it.
My first set up was a QNAP 251 2 bay w/ 8GB iron wolf 3.5in disc. I set it up in the great room attached to router as NAS. Be very careful where you set up Your NAS if you have standard 3.5in discs. It took 2 weeks before I ripped that out of the great room. We could not stand the mechanical spinning while watching movies.
Also most NAS devices don’t like SSD’s for some reason. I use “enterprise class” HDD’s in a RAID 10 array with a hot spare (speed + redundancy). It is also in another building so the noise isn’t an issue.
Can you say which RAID array you use?
I’m not exactly sure of the nature of your question but I use Synology 1513 (5 bay) which are a few years old and I also have a 3018 (6 bay) which is pretty new. With RAID 10 you only have half of the actual drive space available due to redundancy. 5 x 8TB drives gets you 16TB storage with one hot spare. The hot spare is literally that. If a drive begins to fail the system sends you a warning (switchable by software setup). You literally pull the bad drive out of the box and it picks up the hot spare and rebuilds the array. You then put a new drive back in, format it, and assign it as a hot spare. Awesome system really.
I don’t know about the past but Most new NAS drives have no issues with SSD. My NAS is a Qnap and it has 2 M.2 SS drives and a 2.5 SSD for Roon core plus 2 large 3.5 inch HDD’s for Music and its flawless.
It may be just the Synology NAS or maybe just dated info. I know that they recommended not using SSD’s. Not sure why. I’ll do a little research to see if its still an issue. In my case it would pretty expensive as I have 12 x 4TB drives and 7 x 8TB drives spread out between 3 NAS’s.
My QNAP 251+ was just loud with 3.5in HDD… If you want to buy it… $400 w/ 8TB Ironwolf HDD. When I run it in my office it is annoying at best… now it is a hat rack. In the great room my wife was like NFW, that’s out of here. Maybe in a closet…
I’ve been using a Synology 4 bay NAS for about 5 years. Having network attached storage with its fault tolerance and away from the stereo changed the game.
I have it in a home office next to the router where fan noise won’t be an issue.
Looks like it was old info. They do recommend various make and models of SSD’s now. Only “enterprise class” SSD’s are recommended. Some SSD manufacturers do not recommend using specific models in RAID arrays. I couldn’t find an enterprise class SSD over 1.92TB recommended on Synology’s site.
To clarify, the noise was not QNAP fan, it was the drives spinning. SSDs are so cheap these days, that is the way to go.
I used to use only 10,000 rpm drives. Those things were NOISY. Turns out the slower drives are plenty fast enough for network RAID service.
We have a couple closets on the living room (where the stereo sits), that are on the opposite wall and have AC power.
That would be a perfect spot.
Just have to make sure the Synology I’m looking at has whisper fans.