Solid State or HDD for new Synology NAS?

[Machinemessiah]

Hi, looking for some advice on which type of hard drive to install in a new Synology NAS that I will be purchasing next week. I'm going down the NAS route to replace my ipod as the main source of music at home.

I have been told by a local computer shop that solid state is more reliable than HDD and transfers data much faster than the latter. Does anyone agree with this? It is of course more expensive but is it worth the extra? I can get Samsung 250gb hard drives for £149 each locally so I could buy up to four of these and use them in RAID configuration (about £600) or just buy a 1TB HDD for under £100. Does solid state or HDD make any difference to SQ?

I also have a PS Audio DAC with a USB input which I think is up to 24/96. I believe you can plug the Synology straight into this and use their app to control the music playing that way. Is that better than putting the NAS on my home network instead? Finally, what are people's experiences with HomePlugs, worth the expense, any SQ issues? My router is not in an ideal place and cannot be moved so would consider these as an alternative to 4/5m ethernet cable if they are worth it.

Many thanks for any assistance.

 

[hammill]

The transfer rate of a hdd will be more than adequate, your network will be much slower than the hdd, so you would not get any benefit from solid state drives. There will be no difference in sound quality.

I use homeplugs to network my squeezebox touch and it works fine.

 

[hammill]

The transfer rate of a hdd will be more than adequate, your network will be much slower than the hdd, so you would not get any benefit from solid state drives. There will be no difference in sound quality.

I use homeplugs to network my squeezebox touch and it works fine.

 

[roger06]

... or just buy a 1TB HDD for under £100.;

You can get a 2TB, NAS-optimised HDD for comfortably under £100.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Red-Desktop-Drive/dp/B008JJLZ7G/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=9URFZVN1YNOJ&coliid=I1OIGPF8XWBDWZ

 

[Andrew17321]

Solid state discs are not necessarly more reliable than moving hard discs under normal usage - they too die of overuse and old age. The whole point of using a RAID NAS is to build in redundancy, so that if a disc fails it can be replaced without loss of data. So one can use much cheaper conventional hard discs.

One advantage of solid discs is that they are silent, if that is important. SD discs are fast for disc intensive use in a computer, but you do not that speed advantage for audio, or indeed, video.

I suggest that you put your money into larger standard hard discs, eg 2TB; you will almost certainly need more storage in the future for various back-ups, video files, etc. What I have found important is making sure your NAS has Gb ethernet & USB3 ports: these allow fast file transfers. I back-up my NAS periodically and when there is 1TB to transfer it can take a fair time, and a very long time (a day) with USB 2 or 100 Mb ethernet.

(Why do I back up my NAS, some may ask? I store my back-up well away from my study, so that if my study is destroyed I still have all my files. Second, I have been caught out by a NAS hardware failure: getting another NAS years later that can use read off the files on the discs can be a problem.)

Andrew

 

[professorhat]

Totally agree - no need for SSDs in your NAS, especially for music playback. You'd be much better to get at least two 2 TB or even 3 TB drives and use RAID to protect you from hard drive failure. You'd be surprised how quickly you'll use up the storage when you have it available.

And yes, if you've got important data on your NAS, then definitely back it up to an external USB disk, even if you use a RAID. RAID protects you against a single hard drive failure, but not things like corruption, accidental deletion, electricity surge, fire, flood etc. etc.

 

[bigboss]

... or just buy a 1TB HDD for under £100.;

You can get a 2TB, NAS-optimised HDD for comfortably under £100. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Red-Desktop-Drive/dp/B008JJLZ7G/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=9URFZVN1YNOJ&coliid=I1OIGPF8XWBDWZ

Yup, that's the one I've got, and would recommend for NAS drives.

 

[Machinemessiah]

Thanks for all the replies, I will go down the 2TB+ HDD route. What software will I need to control the music coming off the HDDs?

My current thought is to try the NAS connected by USB to my PS Audio DAC. Anyone any experience of doing it this way straight to a DAC? If this isn't right for me then I will purchase a Cyrus streamer instead. Not going to lay out that sort of money if there is a cheaper alternative that works just as well!