Which NAS??

Jason36

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Having recently sold my Caspian CD Player I am looking to replace this with a Sonos system consisting of the Sonos Bridge and the Sonos ZP90. The Bridge will be hardwired to my router in the lounge and the ZP90 will be connected to my Caspian Pre/Power Amplifiers in the Dining Room and will be used for streaming saved music, spotify and radio stations controlled by either my Android Phone or an Apple iPad using the Sonos App.

I am looking to move all my music (Apples Lossless) from my laptop on to a NAS Drive which will be stored in the lounge out of site and hardwired into my wireless router. The NAS will also be used for storing downloaded films eventually, hopefully streamed to my TV (but that is down the line).

I am looking for advice on what people would recommend NAS wise. If you buy a NAS does it come fitted with the drives or they extra?? would probably be looking for at least 500mb storage (more than enough for my music content at the moment) but if I can get 1TB cheap enough then that would future proof.

What do people use on here...must be easy to set up, reliable and run quietly.

Cheers
 
A

Anonymous

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I have good experiences with Thecus and QNAP, and have heard good things about Synology. Most NAS's can be bought either with or without drives, but be sure to buy one in which you can change the harddisk(s). The server is likely to outlast the drives.

Some Thecus models come with a license for Twonkymedia Server, which is a good DLNA server for streaming. Other manufacturers might have followed suit.

Another option is to buy a network media player with harddisk, they act as NAS but come with a remote control and hdmi outputs too. I'd be looking at Asus OPlay HD2 or Western Digital WDTV.
 

Paul.

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Drobo is the daddy of Nas drives, but is certainly isnt quiet (new ones may be quieter, but mine is quite old). It runs a small number of apps, so you can use it as an iTunes server, DLNA, torrent client etc.
 

The_Lhc

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I bought a Netgear Stora, mainly cos it was cheap (came with a single 1TB drive, I must get around to sticking another one in at some point), however I couldn't honestly recommend it. It does the job (providing storage for my Sonos system) but it's VERY restricted in the setup (you can't even create your own shares for example, you have to live with the ones provided) and the fact that it REQUIRES a working internet connection before it'll allow access to anyone is faintly disturbing I have to admit. Given the choice again I'd spend a bit more and go for something else.
 

hammill

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I would seriously consider getting a NAS with RAID 1 capability. This will enable you to write to two disks simultaneously, providing a pretty good backup. Hard disks do fail. Although 1TB seems huge, it should not be long before we can legally rip blu-rays and you wont get many of those on a 1TB drive, so I am not sure how future proof it will be.
 

Zarn_Smith

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I highly recommend Qnap, not so much Thecus. I have owned models from both. (They both sell great NASs but Thecus drop support for their older kit too rapidly in my opinion.)
 

The_Lhc

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hammill said:
I would seriously consider getting a NAS with RAID 1 capability. This will enable you to write to two disks simultaneously, providing a pretty good backup. Hard disks do fail. Although 1TB seems huge, it should not be long before we can legally rip blu-rays and you wont get many of those on a 1TB drive, so I am not sure how future proof it will be.

If the NAS is intelligent enough you should be able to replace one 1TB drive with a 2TB one and then, once it's finished syncing the drives, replace the other 1TB with another 2TB drive and sync that, hopefully without even powering off, but it will depend on the NAS.
 

hammill

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The_Lhc said:
hammill said:
I would seriously consider getting a NAS with RAID 1 capability. This will enable you to write to two disks simultaneously, providing a pretty good backup. Hard disks do fail. Although 1TB seems huge, it should not be long before we can legally rip blu-rays and you wont get many of those on a 1TB drive, so I am not sure how future proof it will be.

If the NAS is intelligent enough you should be able to replace one 1TB drive with a 2TB one and then, once it's finished syncing the drives, replace the other 1TB with another 2TB drive and sync that, hopefully without even powering off, but it will depend on the NAS.
Indeed so. So the future proofing is in getting the right NAS as opposed to getting the biggest drive you can currently afford.
 

Paul.

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With Drobo, all four drive bays are hot swappable. You can pull any drive out without data loss, you dont even have to use symetrical drives for RAID. I have a 2TB, a 1TB, a 750GB and a 400GB in mine. They can be expensive, but they last for ever and are relatively futute proof with four bays.
 

The_Lhc

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Paul Hobbs said:
With Drobo, all four drive bays are hot swappable. You can pull any drive out without data loss, you dont even have to use symetrical drives for RAID. I have a 2TB, a 1TB, a 750GB and a 400GB in mine.

How does that work then? If they're all RAID-5'd then presumably you only have 3x400GB available?
 

nads

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I currently have 3 NAS's. an LG one that has been nothing but problems and also has a very annoying whine when placed on furniture ( it is fine when lifted of it) But it is off for a second motherboard as it keep shutting down underload.

the other 2 are from Ready NAS. both have worked with no probs (one Duo and one NV+)

the Duo has 2X1TB giving 1TB of storage which I use for the Squeezebox and iTunes. the NV+ has 4X2TB giving just under 6TB of space and is used for Movies and anything else.

noise is not so much of an issue as they are hidden away as there is no need to access them.
 

The_Lhc

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The_Lhc said:
Paul Hobbs said:
With Drobo, all four drive bays are hot swappable. You can pull any drive out without data loss, you dont even have to use symetrical drives for RAID. I have a 2TB, a 1TB, a 750GB and a 400GB in mine.

How does that work then? If they're all RAID-5'd then presumably you only have 3x400GB available?

Actually never mind that, just looked at the Drobo webpage, the only 4-bay one they do doesn't mention an ethernet interface, only USB and firewire, is it actually a NAS?
 

Paul.

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Its not strictly RAID, its Drobos own propriatary system. I essentially have 1.92 TB protected data. If you yank out the 750 and replace it with a 2, it automatically shifts all the data around to give you a 2.6TB ish drive
 

Paul.

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Yeah, tell me about it. When I bought mine, the ethernet/wifi bit was a little add on that sits underneath. Never really got round to using the networking bit, the drobo sits under my desk at work acting as my Aperture archive hooked up by FW800. May upgrade if they ever release a Thunderbolt version, they hold their value really well so I shouldnt loose too much.
 

Retne

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I can back up two recommendations here.

First is QNAP - I'm very happy with the (now old) 209 I have, and the fact that I was still getting updates years after I bought it (with some major new features in some cases).

I'd also second the recommendation that Raid 1 is entirely worthwhile as a HDD failed in my PC a while back. Didn't loose much - I think the only thing it was hard to replace was some source files for a site I maintain - but made me glad I'd at least got some data backed up.

R
 

hammill

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I must admit that the TS-219/P looks very tempting. Stick in a couple of 1TB drives and it would meet my current requirements.
 

Jason36

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Thanks for the advice guys,

I have looked at the QNAP and they do look interesting.

Has anyone any experience of the Buffalo LinkStation Duo NAS?

It seems to meet my criteria, which is basically a standard NAS purely for music and films storage. I believe these are what SONOS recommend for use with their products. They also seem to come with iTunes compatability (not sure how this works though) and also Torrent Manager (Is this for downloading films?)

I dont the the ability of print managers, web access or FTP for saving work files.....I just purely need a music streamming system (which hopefully will allow me to stream films at a later date)....obviously at the moment its illegal to copy DVD's and Bluerays, even for home use.

Regards
 

Lee H

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I have the Linkstation Live that I use with my Sonos. It's been fine for me. It sits behind the sofa and I only hear it if I'm running an anti-virus scan. It's maybe 3 years old now and is on all day every day with no problems.
 

Jason36

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Lee H said:
I have the Linkstation Live that I use with my Sonos. It's been fine for me. It sits behind the sofa and I only hear it if I'm running an anti-virus scan. It's maybe 3 years old now and is on all day every day with no problems.

Cheers Lee,

I like the look of the Linkstation and I think its easy enough to setup and obviously meets the criteria of a simple storage and streaming device....sounds like the Linkstation may be the way to go.
 

AnotherJoe

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Have a look at the 4bay Netgear ReadyNAS series.

They also have this expandable raid that lets u start with 1 drive (no backup), then expand to 2 drives (mirrored), and then 3+ (raid 5) just by adding drives.
 

Rich27

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hammill said:
I would seriously consider getting a NAS with RAID 1 capability. This will enable you to write to two disks simultaneously, providing a pretty good backup. Hard disks do fail. Although 1TB seems huge, it should not be long before we can legally rip blu-rays and you wont get many of those on a 1TB drive, so I am not sure how future proof it will be.

Lets be clear here, Raid 1 is not a proper backup, it simply writes the same data to two identical copies across two disks. You still need to keep a separate backup of the data to be safe.

For example if you accidentally delete something off your Raid 1 NAS where is your so called backup then?
 

hammill

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Rich27 said:
hammill said:
I would seriously consider getting a NAS with RAID 1 capability. This will enable you to write to two disks simultaneously, providing a pretty good backup. Hard disks do fail. Although 1TB seems huge, it should not be long before we can legally rip blu-rays and you wont get many of those on a 1TB drive, so I am not sure how future proof it will be.

Lets be clear here, Raid 1 is not a proper backup, it simply writes the same data to two identical copies across two disks. You still need to keep a separate backup of the data to be safe.

For example if you accidentally delete something off your Raid 1 NAS where is your so called backup then?
Like I said it is a pretty good backup and a much better backup than most people ever aspire to. Ask anyone here who has a non RAID NAS and ask them how often they backup. If they do not have original media, most will have little or nothing. When you have this amount of data, most people have no practical way of backup to seperate media - 1TB on blu-rays?. Of course any proper back up solution requires seperate media kept at least a jumbo jet crash distance away but we are talking about music and DVDs here, not the land registry. As for deletions, well RAID will not help you, but given how people on this forum want to use a NAS I dont see that as a huge issue - particularly as most will use soft delete and have the recycle bin as backup.
 

iemslie

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I'm running a QNAP TS509, but that would be overkill for your requirements.

I'd certainly suggest something like a 1 or 2 bay QNAP or Synology, the latest models will provide all the features you need now and most likely in the future. I believe the Synology have Airplay direct to Airport Express now, which sounds interesting (wish QNAP would hurry up and catch up!)

As others have stated, RAID is not backup, so don't feel that you need to look at creating an array. Just ensure that you back everything up to a seperate external disk.

Cheers
 

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