Article: Reevaluating My Music Storage

[The Computer Audiophile]

View full article

[The Computer Audiophile]

3 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

This is a little tangential to your real subject but one simple fix for this specific weak spot is to have your NAS box on a UPS.  If I flip a breaker, the UPS beeps and I can (1) unflip the breaker, (2) tell the NAS to turn itself off gracefully or (3) fix the electrical problem with the time afforded by the UPS.   

Agree.

[The Computer Audiophile]

7 minutes ago, AudioDoctor said:

I have no answers, only a rabbit hole of options.

That fells about right. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

12 minutes ago, doozer said:

I'm new to this so excuse me if this is not feasible..

 

You could just build your own. Supermicro has many cases that support dual power supplies. Put in a comparable motherboard and such. It might be a little more expensive, but when one item breaks it doesn't need to be completely replaced. 

Absolutely an option. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

7 hours ago, bobfa said:

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.

 

-----------------

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Hi Bob, I’ve avoided a UPS ever since one took down the data center at the company I used to work for. Then, it nearly caught fire. The thing designed to save you, is the thing that takes you down. 
 

I hate them, but do admit they can and do work for many people. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

58 minutes ago, botrytis said:

Be careful with QNAP - the OS they are using still seems to be full of holes and the many security experts have been poo-pooing their products because of that.

I don't disagree. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

8 minutes ago, Priaptor said:

Chris, 

 

As I indicated before, the more  "industrial" QNAP NAS at TS-h1090FU | Hardware Specs | QNAP (US) have dual power supplies and are also all FLASH with the same benefits of the TS-1290.  The h1090FU is their 1U rackmount but many other options. 

That one has the perfect options. Even if a PSU fails, it's so easy to replace. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

10 hours ago, bobfa said:

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.

 

-----------------

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Hi Bob, DAS is an attractive option. But, it forces me to think about the pros/cons of something like a Tunderbolt 3/4 attached NVMe vs. the internal NVMe. Yes, more options and questions and research. 

 

For example, the new MacBook Pro can hold 8TB of NVMe storage. I believe it's split between two internal chips, so it's even faster than a single internal 8TB NVMe. I could get an 8TB Thunderbolt NVMe from OWC for $1,399, with speed up to 1553 MB/s. 

 

I don't know if I'd notice the speed difference when playing 6GB files. In all likelihood, I wouldn't.

[The Computer Audiophile]

3 minutes ago, Priaptor said:

That would be my first choice, however, I don't know what the dBA rating is. My NAS in my office in my new home where I need quiet as I still work part time.  They don't list the dBA ratings of this unit as they do the deskmount. 

I'm willing to bet, with the small fans on the PSU, the unit is pretty loud. Fortunately, I can place the NAS in the basement. This opens up my options :~)

[The Computer Audiophile]

18 minutes ago, Rcanoe said:

I have a hard time following this thread because of my lack of IT knowledge.    My expansion plan is simple.  When my 2T external drive (connected to digital player) is full I buy another and and start separating out genres and dedicating new 2T drives to that genre.    So If I feel like classical I plug the "classical" drive in etc.   This what I do with my GoPro 4k vids which fill drives up like crazy.   2T drives for $89.   Cheers!

I hear ya :~)

 

I'm happy you have a solution that works for you. What do you do if a 2TB drive fails?

[The Computer Audiophile]

32 minutes 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.

[The Computer Audiophile]

Just now, Rcanoe said:

I have duplicate 2T drives.  If one fails I use the duplicate to replace a new one.   All manual file transfers through a Mac.   Cheers!

Excellent!

[The Computer Audiophile]

25 minutes ago, luisma said:

Hi Chris:

 

I read your post but none of the comments (yet)

 

Having TrueNAS at home and being a dealer of Synology, QNAP, HP, and with knowledge of even Enterprise NAS I would say leave NAS as a NAS, you can rotate your existing NAS and repurpose this one as a backup and get a new NAS, TrueNAS for home use gives you a few perks, the best one is you can keep an HBA controller as a spare and you can care less if the main unit dies, new PC with the HBA and the drives or existing PC with replacement HBA and you are in business.

 

Yes the Computer NAS solution gives you other flexibility but you are a MAC owner and I don't think you will like to deal with Linux, Proxmox or virtualization that's why I would recommend you to keep a NAS just like you do today.

 

My NAS holds family photos, movies, important files, audio and run with 10G interfaces fast enough to sustain 290 Mbps of transfers, I run it virtualized but that's just me.

 

I was about to comment on your wireless experiences before but I decided not too

 

PM me or post publicly here if you have any comments. I have no commercial interest in selling anything here.

Thanks for the recommendation and relaying your experience. 
 

I’m actually a Mac, Windows, Linux, and off/on BSD owner :~) 

 

I like whatever OS works best for the job. I don’t feel like building a PC right now though. So, buying a NAS is probably the best route. 
 

Do the TrueNAS Mini XL+ units have HBAs? They seem kind of small. I figured everything was just onboard chip. 
 

Recovering from a hardware failure is important to me. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

7 hours ago, luisma said:

Hi Chris, I can't find out at the moment with a quick search but I know the HBA adapters allows TrueNAS and the software to build the ZFS vdevs (these are ZFS's logical RAID units) and system, making it transparent to migrate to another RAID / vdev upon failure of the controller. Which is something other technologies don't do. Synology will rebuild a NAS for you but you need to call support and pray they figure it out.

 

ZFS in general:

It has a huge disadvantage which is the writes, if you write continuously without deleting much you are good, if you constantly write and erase, write and erase it will degrade with time, that's the ZFS Achilles heel. I don't write/delete much o it is fine.

The other disadvantage of ZFS is capacity, once you cross 70% of used capacity it degrades performance.

 

Aside of that is a wonderful system, the XL comes with WD REDS, these in the past where SMR (you don't want SMR), I believe now are CMR which are good but I would not go with WD RED's 

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/

 

I usually build my NAS and select Enterprise drives for it (I'm a huge fan of former HGST part of WD today) enterprise drives IMO is the best way to go and they are not much more expensive if you know where to buy.

 

With 8 bays you could do with 14 TB drives (you could use higher capacities 18TB if needed)

 

1x vdev with RAIDZ2 (RAID6) = 14x 6 = 84 TB

 

I personally would do:

 

2x vdevs with RAIDZ2 = 28TB + 28TB = 56 TB (a tad faster and even more resilient) assuming 56 TB is enough for you

 

If you ever need to expand storage you must replace all drives in a vdev one by one and it takes time, that's why I like to split vdevs in maximums of 4 drives and not 8 drives.

 

Synology is much much much more simplified but the overhead of the system, the limitations and the abilities of TrueNAS to do maintenance and check drives etc. are just better IMO.

 

EDIT: 1st paragraph I meant to say "making it transparent to move the drives to a new ZFS system and read the RAID and operate it there independently from the actual hardware controller"

 

 

 

Great info. Thanks!

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 hour ago, Billy_SP said:

I would go in a totally different route. I would pass on anothe NAS or upgrading the MAC.  I would sell the Aurender.

 

Then buy an audio server from the likes of Wolf Audio or Antipodes. Load it with 8 to 10 GB of local storage and call it a day.  It would be fast, simple, elegant, very powerful, flexible, would give excellent sound and check most if not all of your wants.

Can either of those play 12 channel DXD files with 65,000 tap convolution filters?

[The Computer Audiophile]

23 minutes ago, Billy_SP said:

 

I don't know for sure, but according to this review, the Wolf can do multi channel, upsampling and DXD:  https://houseofstereo.com/blogs/news/review-by-posi-ive-feedback-impressions-the-wolf-audio-alpha-3sx-music-server-revisited

 

I have no commercial ties with any audio company, just thought it was a route worth of consideration given that a server can give you plenty processing power and flexibility.  I am considering this route myself by the way.

Thanks @Billy_SP. I will look into it. DXD stereo and upsamping are one thing, but 12 channels of DXD with convolution are another. My Aurender can play 12 channel DXD, but I have to send the audio to another computer for convolution. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

6 minutes ago, bobfa said:

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

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

[The Computer Audiophile]

7 minutes ago, bobfa said:

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?  

 

The inner-geek in me does appreciate such a system and would like it :~)

[The Computer Audiophile]

On 1/18/2023 at 11:03 PM, luisma said:

Hi Chris, I can't find out at the moment with a quick search but I know the HBA adapters allows TrueNAS and the software to build the ZFS vdevs (these are ZFS's logical RAID units) and system, making it transparent to migrate to another RAID / vdev upon failure of the controller. Which is something other technologies don't do. Synology will rebuild a NAS for you but you need to call support and pray they figure it out.

 

ZFS in general:

It has a huge disadvantage which is the writes, if you write continuously without deleting much you are good, if you constantly write and erase, write and erase it will degrade with time, that's the ZFS Achilles heel. I don't write/delete much o it is fine.

The other disadvantage of ZFS is capacity, once you cross 70% of used capacity it degrades performance.

 

Aside of that is a wonderful system, the XL comes with WD REDS, these in the past where SMR (you don't want SMR), I believe now are CMR which are good but I would not go with WD RED's 

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/

 

I usually build my NAS and select Enterprise drives for it (I'm a huge fan of former HGST part of WD today) enterprise drives IMO is the best way to go and they are not much more expensive if you know where to buy.

 

With 8 bays you could do with 14 TB drives (you could use higher capacities 18TB if needed)

 

1x vdev with RAIDZ2 (RAID6) = 14x 6 = 84 TB

 

I personally would do:

 

2x vdevs with RAIDZ2 = 28TB + 28TB = 56 TB (a tad faster and even more resilient) assuming 56 TB is enough for you

 

If you ever need to expand storage you must replace all drives in a vdev one by one and it takes time, that's why I like to split vdevs in maximums of 4 drives and not 8 drives.

 

Synology is much much much more simplified but the overhead of the system, the limitations and the abilities of TrueNAS to do maintenance and check drives etc. are just better IMO.

 

EDIT: 1st paragraph I meant to say "making it transparent to move the drives to a new ZFS system and read the RAID and operate it there independently from the actual hardware controller"

 

 

 

 

I've been thinking about this post more and going over the options endlessly. 

 

I wonder how I can speed up my existing QNAP to max out its performance, for a reasonable amount of money using spinning drives for the main storage. Then add a couple large USB drives to the QNAP and schedule backups to those. 

 

Analysis paralysis to the max :~)

[The Computer Audiophile]

11 minutes ago, Jud said:

Low tech/low cost seems like a great idea to me. Only question is whether the QNAP will take the additional volume of music you’ll be trying to cram in there.

I have four open drive bays and an open NVMe slot for caching if needed. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

3 hours ago, Jud said:

Throughput OK?

I need to do some testing to see where bottlenecks are, there are always some. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

8 minutes ago, bbosler said:

 If the same QNAP is used for storage and backup don't you run the risk of the QNAP loosing its mind and corrupting all the drives ?

 

 

I’m sure it’s possible, but I’m not sure how. 
 

The external USB should be formatted exFAT so it’s readable on macOS and Windows (if that’s needed).

[The Computer Audiophile]

2 minutes ago, botrytis said:

I know that exFAT is very inefficient for size. With Windows and Linux (used Daphile, Volumio, and Red Hat). Not sure about OSX.

I just use it often because almost any OS can read it. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

36 minutes ago, Richard D. George said:

I am tired of dealing with NAS’s.

 

I have ordered an Aurender ACS100.  About $3,400 not including drives.

Relatively small, and has a CD ripper.  Works “plug and play” with a Nimbe CD autoloader.

I get it completely. I have an ACS10 here and love it.