Paul's Posts — 03 October 2012
By Paul McGowan
If you’re hell bent on relying on the computer built into a NAS rather than the one sitting on your desktop to stream music, then by all means make sure you get a good NAS if your library exceeds anything over a few hundred albums. But if leaving your desktop computer running isn’t a big deal, what is it that you can do to store your music?
The two choices you have are an internal or an external hard drive. One my setup I use both: most of my music is stored on an extra internal HD and I back that music up with an external USB drive. This works fine for me because my computer is capable of having a few drives added internally – while most aren’t.
Another alternative is to make sure you have a large HD in your computer and use it for music as well as programs. I am less fond of this approach because it doesn’t take too long before your music storage gets into the Terabyte region (a thousand gigabytes) and that’s a really big internal HD.
I think a better alternative for most of us is to put all your music on a USB HD. You can purchase a 2tB USB 2.0 HD for $100. That is enough storage for a couple of thousand lossless albums to be stored – which means approximately 20,000 tracks which is a lot of music.
Backing up this drive then becomes simple and safer than anything a NAS RAID has to offer. Simply purchase an identical HD and before you go to bed at night, set the two to copy. Then take your second HD and put it in a safe storage area. Update it every now and then.
Your cost to build a library and back it up is about $0.10 an album. Ten cents! That’s five cents per album to store and play and another five cents to keep a safe copy.
Amazing what a nickel will buy these days.
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tomvdw
Hi,
why would a NAS with a good RAID configuration (RAID 1) be less secure then doing a backup to an external drive every night? Unless of course you deleted files yourself by accident?
Thanks,
Tom
ncpl
Hi Tom,
for me RAID on a NAS is great but it does not protect me from total NAS failure (lightning strike, theft, major hardware problem). Having even a very large collection safely stored in a.n.other location is well worth considering….especially as 2, 3 and 4TB USB HDD are reasonably priced.
Thomasj1949
I’d love to hear your (Paul’s), or others suggestions for for dual 1 TB NAS units that “cooperate” with storing music, and seem to operate smoothly over a long period of time. I have all my songs stored on Apple lossless with either Amarra or Pure Music.
larryincmh
For some reason to me it just seems that everyone is making this harder than it should be. I use an HP NAS for my music library which is over 200GB in size and over 25,000 songs, with no issues at all. The device is configured with 2 x 1TB 7,200 RPM drives running over a gigabit network in my home. The device is just set to share folders and I have my main desktop computer, which is server quality unit that runs 24 x 7, running JRiver Media Server, as well as Squeezebox server.
The NAS music folder is simply mapped as a network drive on my computer, as well as any others in the house. My Logitech Squeezebox finds it with no issue, JRiver finds it and plays the music coming from the device, and I can transfer and save any and all folders and files with ease over the gigabit connection to any exterior drive, etc. On top of this anyone who visits my home with a computer can simply browse the network and find the folder and play songs if they desire through whatever program they have on their device.
My NAS is tucked way down in the far corner of the house away from the room where the computer is, for safety purposes. This all operates with no hitches whatsoever and music plays without any slowdowns or hiccups on either the computer or the Squeezebox through my main stereo. Internal backup is via the RAID in the device, and, at times my kids appear to visit and bring their little USB external drives and copy all the contents for their home listening please, so, in a way I have everything also backed up periodically to a device that resides totally outside the home. I also use this same device as the backup location for all the computers in the house as they do full system hard drive backups of the computer, so it does double duty.
It’s painless, works, and requires little or no thought. I am confused as to why all the consternation otherwise. I just don’t see it as that hard (or expensive, since I bought my NAS on eBay used for under $150). Thank you for letting me get my two cent’s worth in.
NetworkGuy
Larry,
Your plan is fine for storing the library itself, but it’s important for everyone to be aware that mirrored disks or an external drive stored on-site should not be considered as backup. As NCPL pointed out above, there are many things that can happen in your home which will just as easily take out two (or more) drives as one – power spikes, power supply malfunction in the device itself, floods, theft, fire, and God knows what else. I even once had a user who brought me her home computer b/c her kid had left the bathtub running in the upstairs bathroom, it overflowed, and soaked the machine. (The hard drive bearing was actually rusted and the disk wouldn’t spin up!) I even once saw a vendor light up a cigarette outside the open door of a server room at work, set off the sprinkler systems, and hose (literally) a shared disk array along with everything else. The rule is that anything can happen, and eventually, it will. So – the key words are ‘redundancy’ and ‘off-site’ for backups. Drives are so cheap now that I keep several in various locations, including one in a safe-deposit box.
petewilson
Yes, a RAID box reduces the likelihood of losing data through disk failure, but disks do still fail. Thus I have
- a Promise Pegasus R4 as my main disk system – a Thunderbolt-connected RAID 5 with 4x 1 TB drives. It’s fast (important for Lightroom and big images) and expandable as music and photos increase.
- an Infrant (now Netgear) ReadyNAS NV+ connected via gigabit ethernet as backup for the Pegasus. I run Time Machine (or now, QRecall) as the backup engine
- and CrashPlan, an offsite backup service which will hold all my stuff even if the house burns down and everything remaining is stolen.
In truth, this is for the photos, which are irreplaceable, but it works jest fine for everything else, too.
– P
fdemello
Paul,
I would also suggest using a program like GoodSync from Siber Systems to sync all your drives. Great program.