NAS POLL - How much NAS do you need in times of streaming???

[DuckToller]

 

Hi guys,
I was looking on the NAS topic for the last weeks and I was wondering in which direction we (the audiophile community) will turn. our interest in storage.
Reflecting my personal behaviour, I have noticed that I use streaming for the ease of use, but quite often for the possiblity to pursue a higher level of selection when it comes to buying a whole album or specific titles.
Thus, the growth level for disk capacity has really slowed down for me, moreover the VOD streaming offers have substituted a big share of our family videotheque, which had been a major contributor to capacity growth. In music terms, DSD and Hi Res definitely have had a good impact on disk deployement, though the supply of interesting new music in these formats does not really correlate to Moore's law for capacity anymore.
For a future project I like to get a picture where the focus of interest for the AS members will be located.
Thanx in advance for participating. Comments are welcome!
Tom aka DuckToller

[Kal Rubinson]

I have four QNAP boxes.  I will retire the two small ones (14Tb)  and will probably add some drives to the big ones (40Tb now) in the next year.  Probably add another 10Tb to each as the collection expands.

[Allan F]

I have approximately 1100 albums stored on my Synology NAS and they occupy less than half the capacity of my 2TB RAID drives. At the rate that I add new music, I can't see running out of capacity any time in the foreseeable future, if ever. I currently do not subscribe to a streaming service.

[DuckToller]

Mille merci,

@Kal Rubinson and @Allan F

for giving some insight about the different directions we may  find in our music loving hobby.

I could imagine, that perhaps the format (i e. DSD or DXD) or possibly the accumulation of collector items are drivers for growth?

For instance, in a rationalized case, if you would listen to the 1100 album of Allan (which I would guess are mostly PCM) with a rate of 6h listening time per day, you could listen to them approximately just twice during the coming year, however you would need only 2 TB extra storage.
Best, Tom

[Kal Rubinson]

My needs are driven by choosing to acquire recordings in multichannel and in DSD or DXD, if possible, and those demand much more space than 16/44.1 releases.  For example, the latter are typically less than 1Gb while the DSD64 mch are in the 2-3Gb range but some, in some higher resolutions, need more space.  The biggest album/work I have is a Mahler 3 in DSD256 in 6channels that is nearly 40Gb!!

 

It is a good thing that storage space is relatively cheap.

[DuckToller]

12 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

The biggest album/work I have is a Mahler 3 in DSD256 in 6channels that is nearly 40Gb!!

WOW !!!

[DuckToller]

Short calculation: 
Under the assumption of 100 minutes music for the 3rd, 1 minute of Mahler 3 in DSD256/6channel equals the same performance in PCM FLAC  as complete disk in 16/44, in turn that's approx. 100 times the volume of CD quality. Sounds like a real trigger to me 😉 
And I can understand clearly why streaming may have some limitations with this use case !!
Out of curiosity, on a side note:
Are you playing them native with 3x DSD26 capable DACs??
Are there special demands for the data transmission if you play these files via network?
Is there a risk of data congestion, and where specifically?
I'd guess playing over WiFi won't cut it
Best, Tom

[Allan F]

1 hour ago, DuckToller said:

Mille merci,

@Kal Rubinson and @Allan F

for giving some insight about the different directions we may  find in our music loving hobby.

I could imagine, that perhaps the format (i e. DSD or DXD) or possibly the accumulation of collector items are drivers for growth?

For instance, in a rationalized case, if you would listen to the 1100 album of Allan (which I would guess are mostly PCM) with a rate of 6h listening time per day, you could listen to them approximately just twice during the coming year, however you would need only 2 TB extra storage.
Best, Tom

 

Yes, the vast majority of my albums are Redbook PCM. I also currently have 85 DSD and 164 Hi Res PCM albums, but no DXD. At present, all playback is upsampled to DSD512 via HQPlayer.

[davide256]

I have 2TB NAS capacity, about 700gb is (mostly) 2 channel PCM music. I plan to upgrade storage to 4TB within 90 days largely because of video storage and

more DSD downloading in the future. Excellent poll, a good followup poll might be to stratify "how much NAS storage do you have for your primary music source",

 wouldn't surprise me if some have NAS's backing up their primary NAS

[Kal Rubinson]

58 minutes ago, DuckToller said:

Short calculation: 
Under the assumption of 100 minutes music for the 3rd, 1 minute of Mahler 3 in DSD256/6channel equals the same performance in PCM FLAC  as complete disk in 16/44, in turn that's approx. 100 times the volume of CD quality. Sounds like a real trigger to me 😉 

It is what it is but that is the biggest one.

59 minutes ago, DuckToller said:

And I can understand clearly why streaming may have some limitations with this use case !!

If you mean Internet streaming services, sure, but plain vanilla 5.1 24/96 is quite doable.  I rely on downloads mostly and have no issues over my LAN.

1 hour ago, DuckToller said:

Are you playing them native with 3x DSD26 capable DACs??

Nope.  Using 8-channel DACs.

1 hour ago, DuckToller said:

Are there special demands for the data transmission if you play these files via network?  Is there a risk of data congestion, and where specifically?

My network backbone is 10G but I have not upgraded all the components on it.  Consequently, I am working with a 1G network and it has not been a limitation.

1 hour ago, DuckToller said:

I'd guess playing over WiFi won't cut it

I have not tried WiFi in a long time.

39 minutes ago, Allan F said:

At present, all playback is upsampled to DSD512 via HQPlayer.

But that has no impact on storage.

14 minutes ago, davide256 said:

Excellent poll, a good followup poll might be to stratify "how much NAS storage do you have for your primary music source",

 wouldn't surprise me if some have NAS's backing up their primary NAS

Good point.  By next week, my two big NAS drives will be in my two homes.  Each will serve its own local players via LAN.  Each will also be a back-up for the other.  (I keep a 3rd local back-up off-line.)

[davide256]

18 hours ago, DuckToller said:

 

Hi guys,
I was looking on the NAS topic for the last weeks and I was wondering in which direction we (the audiophile community) will turn. our interest in storage.
Reflecting my personal behaviour, I have noticed that I use streaming for the ease of use, but quite often for the possiblity to pursue a higher level of selection when it comes to buying a whole album or specific titles.
Thus, the growth level for disk capacity has really slowed down for me, moreover the VOD streaming offers have substituted a big share of our family videotheque, which had been a major contributor to capacity growth. In music terms, DSD and Hi Res definitely have had a good impact on disk deployement, though the supply of interesting new music in these formats does not really correlate to Moore's law for capacity anymore.
For a future project I like to get a picture where the focus of interest for the AS members will be located.
Thanx in advance for participating. Comments are welcome!
Tom aka DuckToller

Qobuz has been a  boon for me, about 50% of my listening now is Qobuz for new music/non serious listening. Which in turn tends to stimulate download purchases when

I like something and want better from it...local storage does trump Qobuz for resolution. I hear you on video, but am still building up my collection of "great movies"... lots

out there that aren't necessarily available/contemporary for streaming.

[astrotoy]

I have a Synology 12 Bay NAS Drive which, over the years has seen an upgrade in storage from 36TB to 48TB to currently 96TB, which probably is it.  Currently I have about 60TB of files, mostly (40 TB) of rips I did of about 11K vinyl and tape albums at 192/24 (you can see the equipment I used in my signature).  I have a pretty large number of hirez mch files (ripped from SACDs or purchased from sources like NativeDSD) and stereo hirez files (up to DSD256 and DXD352 purchased from sources like HDTT).  A typical vinyl album ripped at 192/24 takes around 3-4GB.  Took me about 6 years - 12,000 hours to rip the albums.

 

Larry

[Allan F]

57 minutes ago, davide256 said:

 wouldn't surprise me if some have NAS's backing up their primary NAS

 

My NAS is used solely for storage of my music library. I regularly update two separate backups on portable 2TB USB drives. My largest album is a classical recording of Chopin in DSDx2, which occupies just over 4GB.

[astrotoy]

I have three sets of backups.  One I consider a partial backup within the Synology RAID system, with up to 2 of the 12 drives can fail simultaneously and everything gets rebuilt.  The other two back ups are sets of eight 8TB external hard drives, one at home and the other in two large safe deposit boxes in my bank. 

 

Larry

[DuckToller]

5 minutes ago, astrotoy said:

The other two back ups are sets of eight 8TB external hard drives, one at home and the other in two large safe deposit boxes in my bank.

Because Raid6 is no back-up !!! 😉
I admire the execution of useful rules as you did. Just perfect!
Cheers, Tom
 

[Allan F]

34 minutes ago, DuckToller said:

Because Raid6 is no back-up !!! 😉
I admire the execution of useful rules as you did. Just perfect!
Cheers, Tom

 

Of course your are correct about RAID not being backup. It is a very commonly held misconception that RAID provides backup. RAID provides redundancy, the ability to continue operating should a duplicate drive fail. Many people do not realize, for example, that if you were to accidentally delete files, they would be deleted on all duplicate drives. Moreover, while unlikely, a catastrophic failure of a NAS could potentially destroy the content of all drives in the array. External backup of a NAS is essential for proper security. Not to mention peace of mind. 🙂

[rhmmmm]

I have an HS-453DX, Fanless and works great. Running Roon and can stream to the 5 endpoints in my house in group mode, all in sync. Two 12TB drives in it in RAID-0. I back up to another QNAP NAS which is in RAID 5 and has 4 8TB Drives. 

[WAM]

I use a Melco N1, app. 1TB musicfiles. I do not use a streaming service (I like to own my music).

[bipet]

I have a 4-bay Synology NAS (918+) with all my files on it, about 1.5tb of music. I am a Roon user, and my core is on an intel NUC. Roon backs-up daily to the NAS. The Synology runs in a raid whilst it also duplicated to my office PC and vice versa, this is also uploaded to Onedrive.

 

I take a cold back-up from the NAS everyweek and store elsewhere in the house, I suppose I should really store offsite. This backup includes all the music, files and photo's.

 

I do stream from Qobuz quite a bit but I still use my local files just as much.

[DuckToller]

3 hours ago, rossco said:

I am a Roon user, and my core is on an intel NUC. Roon backs-up daily to the NAS.

Thank you @rossco for your response.

Is there an advantage backing up Roon everyday compared to, say, every week???

[bipet]

I am not sure to be honest @DuckToller. I am still ripping CDs to FLAC, I have about 3500 done and about 2000 to go. No rush really. I listen every day (+Qobuz), TAG, create playlists, like etc and I would not want to lose too much progress if I did need to use a backup. I have one NUC die on me, and I did lose a week. So, it backs every morning 6am, both the NUC and NAS are always on (powered by a HDPLEX psu), so no hassle really.

[DuckToller]

Ah, ok, work in progress ...

That's a scenario that merits the daily routine. Cheers, DT

 

[Teresa]

Under 5. The need for capacity is slowing ...  I checked "Other reasons/answers are welcome"

 

I don't need capacity as under my apartment complex's lease agreement I am no longer allowed to stream or download using their free wi-fi internet. Which is OK with as I prefer playing SACDs.

 

The DSD and 24-bit PCM music files I downloaded (and kept) before this change come out to 65 GB total and I have 403 GB available on my hard drive. I didn't know what a NAS was and looked it up and it appears to be different than the backup drive I use. Some of these computer terms are hard for me to understand.

 

95% of my music is on physical SACDs, I have thought about adding them to my computer. However, from the threads I've read here on creating DSD music files from SACDs it looks like too much work. So I just play my SACDs.

 

I do have a question about NAS that my google search didn't answer, is it a drive that can be activated by multiple devices that play computer music files?

[Kal Rubinson]

49 minutes ago, Teresa said:

95% of my music is on physical SACDs, I have thought about adding them to my computer. However, from the threads I've read here on creating DSD music files from SACDs it looks like too much work. So I just play my SACDs.

Of course, playing files is greatly easier than playing physical discs but the entry fee may seem significant.

51 minutes ago, Teresa said:

I do have a question about NAS that my google search didn't answer, is it a drive that can be activated by multiple devices that play computer music files?

Yes.  Anything that is on the network, wired or wireless, can access the NAS.  ("Network Accessible Storage")

[jabbr]

On 3/11/2020 at 7:24 PM, Teresa said:

Under 5. The need for capacity is slowing ...  I checked "Other reasons/answers are welcome"

 

I don't need capacity as under my apartment complex's lease agreement I am no longer allowed to stream or download using their free wi-fi internet. Which is OK with as I prefer playing SACDs.

 

I’m sure you could purchase & download without calling attention? You could always use a VPN like NordVPN and that will obscure what you are doing but that’s probably too complex for what you need. 

On 3/11/2020 at 7:24 PM, Teresa said:

 

The DSD and 24-bit PCM music files I downloaded (and kept) before this change come out to 65 GB total and I have 403 GB available on my hard drive. I didn't know what a NAS was and looked it up and it appears to be different than the backup drive I use. Some of these computer terms are hard for me to understand.

 

A NAS is a backup drive that connects to your computer via your network rather than a USB cable. 

On 3/11/2020 at 7:24 PM, Teresa said:

 

95% of my music is on physical SACDs, I have thought about adding them to my computer. However, from the threads I've read here on creating DSD music files from SACDs it looks like too much work. So I just play my SACDs.

 

Yeah it’s a bit of work... there are a few ways to do it ... I have an old PS3 that’s attached to my network. When I get a new SACD I send it to my NAS using software that runs on the PS3.

 

On 3/11/2020 at 7:24 PM, Teresa said:

I do have a question about NAS that my google search didn't answer, is it a drive that can be activated by multiple devices that play computer music files?

Yes! It is actually a low powered computer that shares its drives on the network. That’s all. (My NAS runs Ubuntu Linux)