Simple NAS advice please...

[tomlinscote]

 

[tomlinscote]

Hi all,

I have bought a SONOS connect so I can stream music to my amp, at the mo the music is on a USB HDD plugged into the router but it suffers from serious buffering issues unless I use mp3 files. I know people say there is no discernable sound quality between mp3 and higher bit rate files but I have already ripped most of my CDs using itunes and its m4a coding and really don't want to convert them to mp3. My question is if I get a NAS drive to store the music on and plug this intothe router using the RJ45 connection which ones wil work well (easily in other words) with the SONOS??

I am not looking for huge amounts of storage and have little intention of ripping movies etc just music, people seem to like Synology but has anyone tried the cheaper Western Digital Mybook ones, as I can get a 1TB one for about £100.

Cheers in advance....

Tommo

 

[mitch65]

I use a WD My Book World jobbie with a Sonos Connect with no problems but everything is hardwired to the router so no dropouts, if your Sonos is working wirelessly then this 'may' be your issue

 

[professorhat]

I think the key is working out where the slowdown is being introduced. One way to test would be to copy some of the songs in M4A format to your PC's local hard disk and plug this directly into the router, then stream these files from the PC to the Sonos. If this works okay, you know it's the USB connection at fault. If it's not, something else is amiss.

 

[MikeAndo]

I'd suggest buying something like the Netgear Ultra 4 or Pro 4. These are 4 bay NAS which you can buy with either no drives or a combination of drives. It has redundency built in so you have protection in case of a drive failure. It uses 1 drive for redundency, so if for example you bought an empty unit and put in 2x 1TB drives, youd have around 1TB of storage. If you had 3 drives, youd get 2TB storage. It is also very flexable and expandable. Just add in another drive of the same size and it will expand automatically. If you ever fill up the NAS with drrives and want to expand, just replace the current drives one at a time with larger ones and let it rebuild. When its finished with the last drive, it will then let you expand to the increased capacity. The idea being you can just keep on growing with it later. I've been using these for years, with a NV+ before that. The NV+ is too old now however. They currently support drives up to 3TB, so you can put 4x 3TB in for a huge 9TB of storage if you need that much. They should soon support the 4TB drives as well. If 4 bays is too big, you can get the 2 bay version as well, this works in the same way with 1 drive for redundency.

The netgears also have a nice set of media servers built in (uPNP, DLNA and SqueezeBox) and lots of apps you can install for other things. I'd have a look to see what you player supports and/or if theres a specific app for it on there or if it will use one of the built in ones.

I use one of these to a Logitech Squeezebox and it works very well playing my FLAC collection.

Netgear seem have gone all windows-8/tablet style on their website, made it totally useless and I can't even find the Ultra or Pro anymore. It seems they only want people to find their ReadyNAS 100 series, which I have not used but I would expect to probably be similar. I hate it when companies do stupid things with their websites.

I would also suggest you use a gigabit network however, and maybe get a separate switch instead of plugging it all into the router (unless its gigabit). The audio wont need gigabit, but having the network at that speed should be enough to ensure other things like file transfers to/from the NAS don't interfear with your music playback. The main difference between the Ultra and Pro version is that the Pro has the ability to team or bond the network ports for increased throughput - you wont need that for music, I have it because I put HD uncompressed video on it as well as music.

Another brand would be QNAP, they tend to be more expensive. I think WD have also recently introduced a NAS box, that might be worth looking at as well, but I've not tried one so cannot really comment. One thing to note is that a too low-end CPU in the NAS will hamper things when scanning a very large music collection, that might be part of the problem you have now.

I'd also second the comment about wireless - don't use it for streaming, its far too unreliable and is not worth the hassle, I use a cable/wired connection for everything, far less hassle and 'just works' whenever I want it to.

 

[The_Lhc]

The netgears also have a nice set of media servers built in (uPNP, DLNA and SqueezeBox) and lots of apps you can install for other things. I'd have a look to see what you player supports and/or if theres a specific app for it on there or if it will use one of the built in ones.

Sonos doesn't require ANY of that rubbish, it just requires a standard CIFS/SMB network share, so the OPs idea of a basic NAS is a sound one, if that's all he wants to use it for.

 

[tomlinscote]

Cheers for all the replies guys, lots of options there, now time to look at prices and making a decision

Tommo