Digitalising your collection on a NAS drive

I have bought a NAS hard drive and now just need to purchase a NAS enclosure. Currently I have a lot of my music on normal hard drives and play it through a Chromecast Audio to my DAC.

Is it worth me starting to transfer stuff onto the NAS drive now or should I wait? Also can anyone recomment how to file stuff? Should I jusr put every album in a Folder called Music on the NAS drive?

Also which NAS enclosure would you recommend? I'm considering a Synology, not sure which model.

 

I have my backup on a drobo that was given to me, the drobo SUCKS for anything other than a backup its slow and cumbersome but I have 2 tb worth of music on it, for everyday listening I have a external 7TB hd and a 4 that I move around
I have a root folder called music then alpha hierarchy

 

I have a QNAP HS-251+ and I'm very satisfied. I bought it specifically because of its slim profile and it's being fanless. Basically once installed a NAS is just like a file server . The way you create your directory hierarchies is up to you and depend on your preferences and the capabilities of the software you are going to use to play your media.

 

You need to wait as you're going to need to reformat the drive for the NAS most likely .You should also get a second drive for mirroring .

 

I run a Western Digital serving music to the network with one system that has locally attached drive it uses to play media that's kept in sync with the network drive, so there's constant redundancy (very similar animal to Rolltide's mirroring, but there's some physical separation in the location of the two drives). As long as I'm quick on the draw replacing things if one goes down, I'll always have all my stuff. Do whatever works best for you, but don't be happy with one copy of the data.

 

(and this is the point where I'll satisfy the pedantic crowd with a reminder that RAID mirroring isn't a true backup, but in the age of cheap drives is awfully nice to have)

 

The Synology stuff is easy to use but tough to troubleshoot. Everybody has a different experience. They have their own message board which you can visit. Depending on your usage, you can potentially face tons of problems and would need to be quite computer savvy to troubleshoot and resolve these issues.

Synology is what I have but there's also QNAP and a bunch of other companies making some good products. Would I buy Synology again? Sure, but with the understanding that their support is next to nonexistent and that you end up doing most of the heavy lifting if there are any issues. I'm sure it's the same everywhere else so I'm not singling out Synology.

Why did you want to have a NAS? What use did you want to make of it? Understand that with a single drive, you will have no backup in case that drive dies. Best to have 2 identical drives if the enclosure permits it (I use 4) so you can have redundancy. You can create a dynamic volume which means you'll be able to expand it with multiple hard drives down the line.

If you plan on merely streaming music, speed (aside from copying) won't factor in much. If you decide to use it for other purposes such as video streaming, moving lots of files or big files to and from the NAS, get the very best (i.e. fastest) enclosure you can in order to firstly have the necessary speed to stream this much more demanding content and also to minimize the wait time when writing/deleting files.

As for how my media is organized, it's nothing special. A folder called Music, one called Videos, and so on so forth.

 

I use synology. A DS 214 I believe. Works fine. Don't remember what brand drives though. Out of curiosity, how much music you talking about?

 

(not to be outdone, I'll point out that having both my drives a room away from each other isn't considered a proper backup either, but yep - they're so cheap if I really wanted I could have a drive in every room in the house)

 

The enclosure itself isn't going to make much difference unless you're using solid state drives - most HDDs have a read/write speed that will be the bottleneck well before the speed of their supporting cast will assuming that you're on a 1GB network. If you're wireless(*) or the network is wired for 100MB, nothing matters at all because that's what you're capped at for moving bits.

(*) Yes, I know some wireless connections claim to be fast, but you don't see them *that* fast *that* often in real world use in my experience...

 

After lots and lots of research I bought a WD. Not cheap but worth the money as it is quite fast to upload to and it has a RAID system.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01GLRX7OQ/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

For backup I just plug in an external usb drive and use a freeware utility called 'Fast Copy'.


FastCopy

 

I'll repeat what Rolltide mentioned - don't bother moving your files to the new HDD now because the NAS will need to initialize / (re)format the drive for its use. At least NAS's from QNAP and Synology are like that.

With respect to backups, I use external drives connected to my NAS and rotate them between home and the office.

Edit: You should check that the HDD you bought is compatible with whatever NAS you are considering. NAS vendors provide a compatibility list, which includes models / model lines that they have tested. You really should have purchased the NAS first.

Doug

 

You're referring to single-drive performance. It differs in RAID with redundancy. With 4 drives working simultaneously, things are quite different. The performance is quite affected by the CPU speed and RAM capacity of the NAS boxes. Look it up.

 

I've spent hours searching and can't seem to find anything that explains how multiple drive arrays increase network bandwidth.

Less sarcastically, we're talking about two different things.

 

I thought that was obvious. Basically, I was remarking that the end result in terms of how data is received/transmitted is affected by how fast the NAS itself can assign the data to all the drives regardless of how fast the HDs are by themselves. Your comment insinuated regardless of which NAS is chosen that the performance would be the same which is incorrect.

 

You should wait.

 

My suggestion is to buy a two bay box, 4 would be better but 2 is OK. Buy either QNAP or Synology, don't buy DLink or Western Digital, I've had trouble with both of them. Buy NAS drives larger than you think you will need, and buy a external drive as large as your NAS drives. Run your drives in a mirror version of RAID so that each drive mirrors the other, use your external drive to back up the RAID array. Ideally you'd also have another drive you use to back your music up and you'd swap out the two backup and keep one offsite.

Rip your music using either dbPoweramp (versions for both Mac and PC), EAC (PC Only), or XLD (Mac) and make sure you have accurate rips by using the built in AccurateRip database. And do lossless rips, either FLAC or ALAC, depending which universe you live in. Make sure you tag your music and do it consistently.

What program you use to manage your library may have an affect upon what your file structure is like.

 

I've got a Synology 1511 with a 513 as the backup. i have about 6 TB of music catalogued in different folders. I use Minim as my music server and Cambridge Audio to stream it from my NAS to my HiFi at 24/192 where possible.
It works like a dream

 

You should wait until you get your box. Qnap and Synology are the 2 best IMHO.
Get the one that most fits your budget.
I have an older Qnap TS-212P with 2 WD Red 2T drives.

How you file stuff is up to you. On the Nas, I have a Multimedia folder and under that I have a Music folder which has Artist then album folders.
I map a drive to the music folder in Windows and point dbpoweramp to that drive for ripping.
I use a Bluesound node that points to the Music folder for streaming.

Hope all of this helps!

 

The only other advise I can give is to get yourself a UPS for the NAS. It doesn't have to be a large one, but it should have a USB port that will enable you to connect it to the NAS. This will signal the NAS to go into shutdown in case of loss of power.

Rebuilding a NAS RAID array to discover that you also need to restore all parameters, users, public folders and data is not my definition of fun.

 

That happened to me recently. I had to restore my NAS music server from my hard drive after a power loss corrupted it. I have about 1TB of music and it took a while. The NAS is now on a UPS and set to shutdown properly after about a ten minute power loss.

 

I use my computer to hold a 'master' copy of my digital music and then use a combination of a thumb drive or HD to playback on different systems. These, along with my work computer at a different location, represent my backups. To update the thumb drive and HD I'm using Microsoft SyncToy, which only updates new, or updated, files and not the entire shebang each time.

Is anyone doing anything similar?

 

I did use SyncToy but now use FreeFileSync to make sure my drives all have the same data as my master drive on my PC

 

I have a Synology NAS and like it fine. I can stream my music from it using the Synology web site or Plex through my cell phone. As others have said here, don't bother copying anything onto it until the NAS sets it up.