Article: Reevaluating My Music Storage

[bobfa]

As you might guess I have thoughts!  I cannot count the number of drives and NAS devices that have failed on my watch.  Power Supplies, Remember Drobo???, the Wrong models of 3tb drives with infant mortality.  The UPS is but another thing in the chain to fail.  I have had three of them go belly up in the last two years.  They love to toast the stupid lead acid batteries and their terrible failure modes.  How many times has the UPS said the battery is good only to find out that it is actually dead and you get an extra 5 seconds of pain when the power goes out.  I know Annual Maintenance.    Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel–iron_battery for something a lot better. OR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery. We can do better folks!  Or different.

 

 

 

 

I am a firm believer in DAS (Direct Attached Storage).  Sprinkle in some U2 drives (NVME but removable) and you are talking real performance

 

Here is where I am going to lose 60% of the audience.  I use Macs!  I have to support windows and I hate it.  When I have to support linux I outsource it.  

 

I use a NAS for backup purposes only.  MY primary is a 5 bay Synology DS1019+ with five 8tb drives and 512GB of SSD cache.  The software is weird it, but it just keeps running.  In the next year or so I will replace it.  I do not trust the hardware any longer than about three years.  The NAS also runs minimserver for me.

 

I have two DAS solutions I want to talk about.  The OWC Thunderbay 8 and the OWC MiniStack STX. The Thunderbay 8 looks like a shrunk down Mac Pro of old.  It has eight drive bays and a spare expansion slot.  The top four drive bays can use U.2 drives AKA removable NVME at PCIE speed.  The bottom four bays are SATA. The MiniStack is a much simpler device with one m.2 NVME slot and one SATA slot.  it is a Thunderbolt 4 hub and the drives are basically running at SATA speeds.

 

We can jigger these up with TB to 10gig ethernet if you want..  Now I only have about 8TB of music files in my library!  The music system is a single M1 Mac mini with the STX attached and 18TB + 4Tb inside the STX.  The Mac mini backs up to the NAS and the system drive to the cloud.  I manually backup the NAS to 2.5 in portable drives for storage in my Safe Deposit Box.  Manual and a bad idea becuuse it does not get done often enough.

 

The systems (more about this later) are backed up offsite to iDrive.  This is my partially executed 3-2-1 backup system with a +1 helper. I am looking at cold storage in the cloud such as C2 or Glacier.

 

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Note that this design is not final and I am open to other ideas.

 

PS 18TB spinning drives are $399. 

PS JBOD is your friend

https://www.arqbackup.com is a very very interesting core tool to try.

20TB of idrive space is about $300 for two years.

 

 

 

 

[bobfa]

The scale of this data is daunting.  But streaming it should not be that intensive.  Twelve channels of TrueHD flow down a USB 2 port just fine in my system.  The buffering in JRiver and HLC add a good portion of the potential delays.  I mostly see this on first startup with when the HDD spins up and / or when I change what I am playing.  This is with the 770mb transfer rates on the OWC and the 18TB HD.  I also think that only 8GB of RAM may have an effect.  We have to identify the places where delays are introduced.

 

 I am very focused on economy so that impacts my thinking.  I dislike the fact that starting playback I loose the first few seconds of playback.  I have not tried to address that yet as there have been larger problems to address.  

 

Separating the playback from the backup and redundancy issues might help us think things through.

 

How to the production studios handle this?  They have the same set of problems at a much larger scale!  We might take some clues from them.

 

 

[bobfa]

Treating the digital stereo as an appliance that needs to be serviced with power, connectivity, data storage, backup helps the process.  Applying good IT practices make this pretty simple to think about.  In my case the compute side is a Mac Mini the external storage and the DAC.  In your case your core is the Merging gear with a laptop for compute.  Can you take the laptop out and use something headless or at least different?  A Mac Studio or a new M2 Pro Mac Mini as the core.  

 

I am getting pretty comfortable with Luna Display on my iPad Pro.  The Keyboard folio and Apple Pencil are pretty ideal.

 

[bobfa]

10 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

10 hours ago, bobfa said:

I am getting pretty comfortable with Luna Display on my iPad Pro.  The Keyboard folio and Apple Pencil are pretty ideal.

I'd love to know more. 

 

If I can put a M2 Mini behind the wall and use an iPad for display, it would be ideal. I don't want a MacBook, but so far it's what I have and thought I needed. 

 

What would be awesome, is if I could use my iPad Pro as a connected display via Thunderbolt / USB C, and it worked just like a monitor. I'd put the Mini under my side table and call it a day. I just don't think the current solutions are that good, but I could be very wrong.

 

 

 

I am sitting here with the iPad as the keyboard and display for my Mac mini.  Look Ma No-Wires!

 

 

 

[bobfa]

I wonder  If a “real server” like: https://system76.com/servers.  Would be a better idea.  configure it like you want.  Run windows in a VM for those needs, pick a NAS software pagckage?  

 

Do we need a new thread:  The Audiophile Style Data Center! 😇

 

 

 

 

[bobfa]

21 hours ago, Marcin_gps said:

This is exactly why I have all my files backed up on a 2nd drive and on dropbox. 

Be very careful with dropbox it is not a backup system and will sync your files into the ether if you are not very careful

 

[bobfa]

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I'm sure my family woud love when I install fire supression system :~)

I would bet that the biometric security system would come first in their love!  Keypad and retina scanner on the fridge.  DNA scanner on the stairs to the listening room!  Someone would have to feed and take care of the guard dogs on the basement data center.

 

Maybe just add some drives and a TB cache to the NAS!  Back the whole thing up to cold storage and go back to listening!