On the crossroads...digital nightmares

[Tacty]

i m on the verge of a nervous breakdown...i decided to go all digital and couple of weeks ago bought qnap nas thinking about making things simpler...boy..it is slow as hell. any light acitivity stuck qnap processor at 100 %. and worst of all you have to deal with libraries abd that s when things started to get ugly...as you know, you cant get away with one player these days. im using media monkey +asio, itunes and xbmc. it takes ages to any of them to scan music libraries. and i have by todays standards pretty modest collection of 500gb of music, some of them high res, mixed with 320mp3s...it takes ages. and if you made some missteps, and its not so hard with nas, it takes ages to do it again. and lets not talk about how it looks like to move itunes libray onto nas! i cant imagine the horror of dealing with libraries of 4tb or more! and windows...from time to time i cant see my nas under windows workgroup under networks. sometimes it s there but sometimes it s not? and it is important because you have to show any of the players path to your music on nas...

all in all, i m pretty fed up and thinking about alternatives...is there anything simpler and less painfull than nas crap? i m thinking about some network players, even if i m not so happy about new boxes and waf atmosphere is pretty low these days as you can imagine after my loud frustration with setting up my shiny new digital library...or go back to square one, walking more and listening an old fm radio...i m pretty sick of spending hours and hours trying to "set up things"...and word of advice: if any of you is even slightly impatient, please forget messing up with nas and such...bigger internal drive or even external drive are way better solution...and yes, nas is one bay qnap ts 112, i can t even think about how it looks like to deal with the same underpowered nases with 4 or 6 drives with 3tb of music or whatever on each of them!

 

[matt49]

If your processor is at 100% and the connection is sluggish, there must be something wrong somewhere.

Might be worth posting here:

http://www.whathifi.com/forum/computer-based-media/network-storage

Matt

 

[chebby]

Maybe you will find something helpful when reading these blogs...

http://www.whathifi.com/blog/hands-on-with-qnaps-new-qts-40-nas-operating-system

http://www.whathifi.com/blog/how-to-build-a-nas-to-store-your-music

http://www.whathifi.com/blog/how-to-turn-tagging-and-artwork-anarchy-into-blissful-order

 

[stevebrock]

Sorry to hear about your experience!

I can't comment on the QNap, but a lot of peeps on here myslef included have gone for a Synology NAS, 5 mins to put the drives in, 10 mins to set up RAID etc, 6 hours to transfer 350gb of ALAC files from my Mac - I havent touched it since it just sits in the corner flashing away. I use an app to control it and access time is immediate.

Maybe some QNap owners can offer some help?

 

[Andrew Everard]

Now running two QNAPs – a four-bay and a two-bay –, and not sure I recognise any of those problems: they just work for me, streaming content to (at the moment) a Naim NDS and NaimUniti, an Onkyo TX-NR818, a Sony netbox and a Cambridge Audio BD player (via Ethernet), as well as various portable net radios around the house via Wi-Fi using an Apple Airport Extreme as a wireless router.

For example, with the four-bay NAS currently being loaded with more music while simultaneously streaming 24-bit/192kHz out to the NDS, using MinimServer and transcoding on the fly from FLAC to WAV, CPU usage on the NAS is running at about 15%.

It would be helpful to know how the OP's NAS is connected to the network, what the router is, and what the playback devices are and how they're connected to the netwok, but as a first hint going blind on this to some extent without knowing all those variables, I'd say a first step would be to go in and allocate a static IP address to the NAS, so at least all the playback devices know where to find it.

If the IP address keeps changing, it can cause some of the problems the OP is experiencing.

 

[stevebrock]

I knew Andrew would be along sooner or later to give some advice

My NAS is hardwired to my Router & DAC so have no problems whatsoever, it even writes a Time-Machine back up of my MacBook Pro's hardrive everyday.

 

[Tacty]

music player in my setup is toshiba netbook, tp link 150mb router is hard wired to everything including nas..wd red 3tb is in nas...no connection is made by wifi, i think i have disabled wifi adapter in toshiba as well...nas is most of the time extremely slow to respond but i cant find where the problem is...i still think those processors are weakest link in nas...yesterday i started logitech media server on netbook...slow scanning library as well...deinstaling lms on netbook and started lms directly on nas...started scanning of library yesterday evening and right now there is 10.000 files left for scanning out of 50.000...after 12 hours...think it is slow by any standards...i have dell studio hybrid doing htpc duties on plasma tv and i have no problems watching full hd movies from nas through the network...but slow dealing with libraries gives me headaches....

 

[Andrew Everard]

music player in my setup is toshiba netbook, tp link 150mb router is hard wired to everything including nas..wd red 3tb is in nas...no connection is made by wifi, i think i have disabled wifi adapter in toshiba as well...nas is most of the time extremely slow to respond but i cant find where the problem is...i still think those processors are weakest link in nas...yesterday i started logitech media server on netbook...slow scanning library as well...deinstaling lms on netbook and started lms directly on nas...started scanning of library yesterday evening and right now there is 10.000 files left for scanning out of 50.000...after 12 hours...think it is slow by any standards...i have dell studio hybrid doing htpc duties on plasma tv and i have no problems watching full hd movies from nas through the network...but slow dealing with libraries gives me headaches....

Strange... Just did a full Twonkymedia rescan of the content on my NAS – 65,750 tracks – and it took about half an hour. The fact that the NAS plays movies fine through the network suggests the problem may be in the media server software rather than the NAS hardware itself, but I'm kind of at a loss to work out what the problem is.

 

[Tacty]

music player in my setup is toshiba netbook, tp link 150mb router is hard wired to everything including nas..wd red 3tb is in nas...no connection is made by wifi, i think i have disabled wifi adapter in toshiba as well...nas is most of the time extremely slow to respond but i cant find where the problem is...i still think those processors are weakest link in nas...yesterday i started logitech media server on netbook...slow scanning library as well...deinstaling lms on netbook and started lms directly on nas...started scanning of library yesterday evening and right now there is 10.000 files left for scanning out of 50.000...after 12 hours...think it is slow by any standards...i have dell studio hybrid doing htpc duties on plasma tv and i have no problems watching full hd movies from nas through the network...but slow dealing with libraries gives me headaches....

Strange... Just did a full Twonkymedia rescan of the content on my NAS – 65,750 tracks – and it took about half an hour. The fact that the NAS plays movies fine through the network suggests the problem may be in the media server software rather than the NAS hardware itself, but I'm kind of at a loss to work out what the problem is.

strange it is...to be honest, i have started minimserver on toshiba as well, and initial scanning was a lot faster...twonky scanning seems like a lot faster as well...in one moment though i have seen twonky was disabled on itself on nas, i cant remember i was doing it, but it may be some twonky bug...so, what could be the problem: itunes, media monkey, logitech media server and xbmc are all slow scanners with new files?

P.S. like i've said...this is a quote from logitech forum about slow scanning of lms server and qnap nas...

"Well, the long scanning time is something I think you will have to live with. Almost every NAS has that kind of problems - except those with a CPU that is close to a pc's which yours isn't."

and

"and yes, an underpowered NAS (many are) are very slow scanners. Can't recall exact times, but my old readynas duo took all day to scan about 60,000 files and my vortexbox takes less than an hour. Control/browsing with my old readynas was also very slow."

 

[matt49]

strange it is...to be honest, i have started minimserver on toshiba as well, and initial scanning was a lot faster...twonky scanning seems like a lot faster as well...in one moment though i have seen twonky was disabled on itself on nas, i cant remember i was doing it, but it may be some twonky bug...so, what could be the problem: itunes, media monkey, logitech media server and xbmc are all slow scanners with new files?

I doubt these programmes are normally slow to scan. I wonder if there's a hidden process running in one of the media programmes that's holding the others up. Presumably you've run a process explorer?

 

[Tacty]

@matt49

i have edited my post, so you wasnt see some quotes...at the end of the day it is underpowered nas...and some slow media scanners as well which add up to long scanning time...and we are talking about initial scanning, i suppose adding new files out from library will be faster...and just to be sure another quote from logitech forum as well...

"Yesterday I bought synology DS110j and install logitech media server(squeezebox server)

version 7.7.1 - r33735.

I copied all my music library from PC to NAS and try to scan the media files in NAS.

and I surprised......It takes even more time to scan the libraries in NAS than copy the media files from pc to NAS."