NAS For Squeezebox?

[admin_exported]

Hello,
I know this topic has come up hear before but reading through the previous posts I would like to clarify a few things.
Any advice you could give would be great.

Basically my laptop is full so I am going to have to do something to listen to new music on my squeezebox!

I believe I should be able to get a NAS that will allow me to:

* Stream music wirelessly to the squeezebox without requiring the laptop to be running
* Run the other plugins such as the BBC listen again without requiring the laptop to be running
* Manage a shared itunes library
* Use a 2nd mirrored hard drive to make a duplicate copy of everything on the NAS
* Download content to NAS from internet while the laptop is off

Have I understood this correctly? Are there any particular devices you would recommend?
In saying all this… is there much advantage to using a dedicated NAS instead of a low spec PC server?

Thanks!

 

[The_Lhc]

For that lot you'd probably be better off with a low-spec PC server. There are NAS's that can run squeezecenter or whatever the software is called now but from what I understand they're a little slow. As for iTunes, JD doesn't seem to think there are any usable iTunes NAS servers.

I've no idea about the BBC listen again stuff, they're generally podcasts I think, I would have thought Squeezebox can handle those itself, Sonos can, but I might be wrong. As for downloading content, there are some that have bittorrent clients built in but as they're generally used for naughtiness I wouldn't know anything about them. A server might be be more useful but you're effectively back to having a PC running permanently anyway.

 

[nads]

for most of the things you list it aint happening without a PC being turned on.

but as a device that will run SBS then the Ready NAS Duo works well. (it aslos have a iTunes thingy on it...)

the Touch (now released) may do the other bits you want.

 

[mattjax05]

I have the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo. No problems running Squeezebox Server on it. Updates are easy too. Yes the user interface is slow but it was on my PC anyway, this doesn't affect playback (I believe) The NAS has an iTunes shared library option but I tried this and it kept losing connection to my pc which was running the iTunes server.

Also got RAID which is the mirrored hard drive as you state.

Matt