What's the best NAS for a music library

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On 12/27/2022 at 5:07 PM, Richard Dale said:

I’ve got a 4tb usb drive attached directly to my router which runs OpenWRT. I use MiniDLNA to serve music tracks to my KEF LS50W speakers. I could also mount the disk via NFS or SMB to make the music tracks available over the network. A dedicated NAS box isn’t needed.

 

A dedicated NAS box is greatly preferable:

 

If you have used large disc drives for a long period of time, you have had failures. Mirroring or RAID is the solution. This is what a NAS accomplishes. USB attached drives are meant for backup.

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29 minutes ago, Richard Dale said:

I don’t see any need for mirroring or RAID unless the music collection is larger than a single USB disk, ie at least 6 tb or so. I’m sure plenty of people on this site might have music collections that are larger than that, but I would be surprised if it was typical for an average audiophile. I have plenty of backups that I make by periodically running rsync or rdiff_backup onto other USB disks. 

 

Thats nice and I'm sure that works for you. Have you considered that your backups might develop bitrot? Have you encountered bitrot yet? I have drive arrays that I have maintained for 20 years because they self correct/heal due to the ZFS filesystem. Now that ZFS is built into Ubuntu, this is easy to use for everyone. In any case I can assure you that while backups are a good idea, mirroring has its own benefits and given the willingness of audiophiles to drop $kilo on all sorts of PSUs and cables, mirroring is cheap and works great, and anyone who has invested time in building a large music library should do it. YMMV

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18 hours ago, Jud said:

Couple of questions regarding ZFS: I had a quick glance at it when rebuilding my system(s) (Windows update went wrong and took out two Linux installations besides; my music wasn't touched because it's on a couple of local external drives I keep synced, plus a remote backup).

 

(1) My quick glance seemed to show ZFS is happiest when taking up (at least) an entire drive.  Is this correct, or can it live on one part of a drive with other OSs/filesystems on the other parts of the drive?

 

(2) I'm running 4 OSs - Win11 (developer beta), Xubuntu, ArcoLinux (based on Arch), and MacOS Ventura (developer beta). If I cared to use ZFS for the two external USB storage drives where I keep my music, would there be problems communicating between those drives and any of these 4 OSs?  (I also wonder whether Backblaze personal backup would have trouble with ZFS, but unless someone here has relevant experience, I'm going to assume Backblaze support is a better place to look for that answer.)

 

Yes give ZFS the entire drive. Drives are cheap, this isn't where you want to save a few bucks.

 

When you want to move the drives to a new host (possibly running a different OS) just:

$ zpool export <pool>

and then

$ zpool import <pool>

 

My drives are on an external SAS3 enclosure which connects to my NAS via a SAS3 cable (the enclosures can be daisey chained). At the very least:

1) get a cheap box which can run Ubuntu server

2) create a pool from a drive large enough to hold your entire library

3) add another drive to that pool to create a mirror

4) use SMB to share the filesystem over the network

(that's a NAS)

 

each of the OS you list can mount a network drive via SMB

 

**Now** if you insist on using ZFS with external USB drives, yes you can and here are instructions:

http://jenpeterson.net/zfs-blog/

that said, each host OS needs to run ZFS/OpenZFS

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21 hours ago, Richard Dale said:

I have the original CDs that I have ripped, and I always keep the originals that I have bought and downloaded from sites like Qobuz. I also keep my collection in both AIFF and Apple lossless formats, and have multiple backups in multiple sites.
 

I agree the ZFS might be better than ext4 or the Apple file system, but in the context of audio systems with more modest sizes like mine (c. 3300 albums) RAID is just a solution looking for a problem. Modern hard disks have built in error correction and detection at the hardware level, and I am not too worried by bit rot.

As long as you are satisfied with your system that's great.

 

My own library contains a lifetime of photographs, home movies/videos, as well as audio recordings as well as purchased music. My own media is critically important to me. I've also been involved in archiving digital data for 40 years. Yes "smartctl" can be used to measure hardware error correction rates. When silent hardware errors start to get corrected with increasing frequency and as sectors start to go bad, that can be a sign of impending disc failure (I'm currently monitoring several drives from circa 2015 in my 15 disc array). It all comes down to cost vs how important the digital data is to you. My own system, for me, is very very cost effective compared with the high reliability and I demand a high degree of data integrity.

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20 hours ago, Jud said:

 

Thanks. Yep, a NAS that can be mounted via network does seem to make by far the most sense.

 

It could be that I might want to retain one or both of the external USB drives separately. My inexpensive off-site backup (Backblaze personal) is happy running on Windows, where the external USB storage is seen as just another drive. And I like some of the MacOS utilities for tagging and ripping (Yate, XLD). So whenever I set up a NAS, I'll have to test whether the level of speed and convenience is reasonably similar using those apps with the NAS mounted as a network share.

 

Sure.

 

SMB can be as fast as your network. At some point e.g 100/200Gbe the network speed equals your PCIe speed so the remote disks approach the same speed as local. This is driving the new NVMEoF protocol where the NVME drives are exposed over the network. Of course that's for big data applications like inferencing etc and Yate/XLD both of which I use, work perfectly fine over WiFi. I'm editing terabyte videos and photos over WiFi which can be a tad slow but somehow sitting in my den is better than my office even though my workstation (which serves double duty as my HQPE server) is hardwired at 100

 

That's enough nonsensical acronyms for the day! 😜

 

Take home message: if your datacrunching needs fast access to the disc drives, the results deserve to be protected! To paraphrase Neil Young "Everybody needs a NAS"