Article: Reevaluating My Music Storage

[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.

[Jud]

2 hours ago, botrytis said:

I have lost documents (like my Ph.D. thesis) to HD errors, and dead HD's. So, I am very anal about backups, etc.

 

Ouch! Wow, the Ph.D thesis being lost is the stuff of nightmares. Were you able to recover/reconstruct it in some way? (Sorry for the OT, but I'm just hoping this has a reasonably happy ending.)

[Dan Gravell]

Have you considered cloud storage at all? I don't mean as the "gold" source of data (i realise you'll want to play from within your network), but for things like external streaming, sync etc?

[botrytis]

1 minute ago, Jud said:

 

Ouch! Wow, the Ph.D thesis being lost is the stuff of nightmares. Were you able to recover/reconstruct it in some way? (Sorry for the OT, but I'm just hoping this has a reasonably happy ending.)

 

I just printed it out. I had all my data backed up, but we had to retype it in. All 275 pages of it. My wife can type 200 characters a minute, so there is that. Then I had to go back through and correct some corrections she did. That is another story.... 🤣

[Jud]

1 minute ago, Dan Gravell said:

Have you considered cloud storage at all? I don't mean as the "gold" source of data (i realise you'll want to play from within your network), but for things like external streaming, sync etc?

 

Do you know of inexpensive cloud storage for large volumes of data in motion rather than data at rest? The cloud storage I'm familiar with (my knowledge is by no means comprehensive) is much less expensive as backup where it can be at rest.  So sync, yeah, external streaming, not that I know of, but maybe you know of something?

[botrytis]

There are small screens that could be used and are touch screens. That could be an option also. 

[Jud]

@The Computer Audiophile - Poking around the interwebs the last day or two I've seen some *very* inexpensive DIY TrueNAS builds (around $1000 exclusive of large storage drives), though with your need for speed in moving data, something up to your specs might be a bit more. The majority of these have been TrueNAS Core, as that's a much more mature OS at this point than TrueNAS Scale.

[Rcanoe]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I hear ya :~)

 

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

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!

[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!

[loop7]

Due to the failures I've read about, I've been replacing perfectly functioning Synology NAS's every two years which is a pain and actually doesn't alleviate all worrying. Luckily, I've been able to sell the swapped out units for something but there's some guilt involved.

 

My Roon usage (NUC Core) has decreased to almost nothing in the last year so the NAS is more archival.

[botrytis]

4 hours ago, 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!

 

I have 6 copies of my music - 6 - 8 TB drives - OK I am anal.....

[scintilla]

I've been using direct connect storage since the beginning.  I have two 8T drives connected to my iMac, one has DSD files and the other PCM.  We can't let them touch because matter-anti-matter explosion, duh.  Anyhoo, these drives are ~$149 at Costco and I just buy another when my drives are full.  I have older smaller drives full of most of the backups.  At some point, I will probably buy two more and just CCC each and put them in the storage closet.  As I see it, these drives get very little use and go to sleep when not invoked by Roon, so I am not worried about wear.  I probably should put them on a battery backup supply.  Costco also sells those pretty cheap.  Plugged into a power strip with a varistor surge protector a backup supply is unlikely to fry anything unless directly hit by lightening.  Good luck with the use-case with anything tho...

[jrobbins50]

17 hours ago, Jud said:

 

As you know, RAID is not a backup plan. (Neither is ZFS, but it is more robust than RAID at avoiding errors.) I would not wait to implement an actual backup.  Have a look at Backblaze's drive reliability data, which is thorough and nicely presented, and get some reliable drives on which to back up your NAS. 

Jud, thank you for the reference to Backblaze. I was not familiar with it. Very helpful. I ordered up three 16Tb drives — WUH721816ALE6L4 — which seem to be highly rated. New for $888 from ServerSupply.com.  I will use them to do a full backup of my NAS for offsite storage. Cheers. JCR 

[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!

 

 

 

[luisma]

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.

[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. 

[luisma]

37 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Do the TrueNAS Mini XL+ units have HBAs?

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"

 

 

 

[Dan Gravell]

16 hours ago, Jud said:

 

Do you know of inexpensive cloud storage for large volumes of data in motion rather than data at rest? The cloud storage I'm familiar with (my knowledge is by no means comprehensive) is much less expensive as backup where it can be at rest.  So sync, yeah, external streaming, not that I know of, but maybe you know of something?

 

Egress cost is something you need to check for, I agree. But it depends what you mean by inexpensive!

 

Wasabi, pCloud and Hetzner all offer what I'd say is reasonably inexpensive - about $60/year or in that ballpark. Is that inexpensive?

[Billy_SP]

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.

[R1200CL]

Big fan of QNAP. Also great support. 

 

I would warn against using to many disks. 6 disks ought to be enough. To many disk in a RAID may be an issue. You will increase the probability of an error. 

 

Using RAID 6 should keep you very safe. Maybe add Jottacloud as extra backup. Very cheap for unlimited storage. (You will need a PC in addition).

 

I like these extra boards that is available with m2 for RAID 1 or 0 for the OS. Or even a virtual PC, if the QNAP is powerful enough. These boards also comes with optional extra ethernet speed interface if needed. Should be great for Roon as well.

 

And don't purchase all disks same time. (Or purchase from different shops). So you avoid same production batch. And always have one or two disks in spare available.

 

Even with an hardware fail on the QNAP itself, you can just switch all disks from one unit to another, and your up in no time. I've tried. Works great. And it works even if from old HW to new HW.

(Cause it's SW RAID). 

 

Better have two reasonable priced QNAP backing each other up, than one huge expensive one. (Or one 6 bay high end, and a cheaper 6 bay middle/low end where you mirror the high end one).

 

QNAP TS-h1290FX is a total overkill in my opinion.

Do you really need it ?

 

https://www.qnap.com/en/selector/raid-selector?bay=6&hdd=16,16,16,16,16,16&raid=6&filter={"other"%3A["ssd_cache_acceleration_support"]}

[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?

[DigiPete]

23 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

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. 

Chris, I worked at the core 3ph UPS development center at APC, I sure hope it wasn't any of their equipment.
I have tremendous respect for the entire team and their cutting edge developments reducing unscheduled downtimes.

I was the technology strategist for cooling, but I still learned a lot and everything I know about power electronics.
Oh, and seeing a 480V vario transformer kapable of 60kA short circuits for UL testing - that just re-defined my understanding of BIG.

BTW I'm a great believer of thunderbolt DAS for surround/immersive, my Promise Pegasus R6 has been serving me well and fast for a decade.

[Jud]

4 hours ago, Dan Gravell said:

 

Egress cost is something you need to check for, I agree. But it depends what you mean by inexpensive!

 

Wasabi, pCloud and Hetzner all offer what I'd say is reasonably inexpensive - about $60/year or in that ballpark. Is that inexpensive?

Just checked out the 3 you mentioned, and for the scale of what @The Computer Audiophile would be using, pricing is nowhere near that. Maybe I’m not researching the right thing.

 

Backblaze personal unlimited storage is near that price point for pure backup (data at rest), but not suitable for external streaming and lacks the tools of something like Backblaze’s B2 product, which is suitable for external streaming but where cost escalates with size of storage (and with data egress).

[Dan Gravell]

4 minutes ago, Jud said:

Just checked out the 3 you mentioned, and for the scale of what @The Computer Audiophile would be using, pricing is nowhere near that. Maybe I’m not researching the right thing.

Sorry - you're correct, that's the 1TB cost I quoted, I must've been rushing and forgot to apply it to this case. So basically quite a lot of money!