thinking about a server

[timm]

hi all... I was hoping you might be able to help with a bit of my understanding on creating a music server..... Would it bests to purchase external drives ... or would it be better to get internal drives for a server of some sort.... Can you just pull the internal drive out of an external drive if you want to go the NAS server route in the future... Or is a NAS just simply multiple drives hooked up via USB? I know I'm an idiot....

Secondly, software... is the basic approach to get something like JRiver or Foobar 2000 and use your computer to handle the tasks?

What is the difference between ISO files and DSD... DSF? files (sound/size).... Can I just roll with the ISO? If I have something like this - how easy is it to JUST play the stereo versions of your music?

Do I basically need a laptop up all the time to handle this... and ... finally.... can I use a tablet/phone to drive this vs having to type / choose things from my laptop?

Sorry -- I just started to get into this -- I'm not totally illiterate when it comes to computers - (I'm in IT) - but I have always worked with ERP software... not PC's!!

I have a squeezebox touch 3 -- how much rez can it take over wifi / and via usb...

Lots of questions...... Hoping someone can help me avoid big mistakes.... Thanks Tim.

 

[TomDac]

a NAS is an enclosure with multiple drives inside that, if RAID protected (also called "Striped") can add a level of protection. Each of the drives contains information about what's on the other drives, so if a drive fails, you can pull out the failed one, pop in a new drive and the other drives will rebuild the data on the new drive. I have a NAS with 4 drives in it and one of them failed.. just like advertised, i replaced the bad drive and the other 3 rebuilt the new one. Very cool. There is some overhead when doing this, though... performance will be diminished and of course, some drive space will be used... Look at Synology.com for some ideas... Their NAS units are supposed to be quite good.

I went with a low cost option (NetGear ReadyNAS) and the processor on the unit isn't very fast, so transfer rates are painfully slow. If I knew then what I know now, I'd spend some more $$ and get a hi performance NAS.

 

[amey01]

I won't go into your post because it is a long and involved topic, and by conducting a few Google searches you'll get answers to all your questions.

But just to clarify a few of Tom's points:

add a level of protection.

Emphasis on "can" and "level of protection". RAID should never be your entire backup strategy as the failure of a individual drive for an isolated reason is extremely rare. Drives usually fail for an external reason, be it a power fluctuation, overheating, flooding the unit, data corruption, etc. If any of these reasons are the case for your drive failure, you'll more than likely fail your entire RAID set and it will be of absolutely no assistance. And that doesn't deal with non-technical factors like fire/theft/etc. You need a comprehensive, OFF-SITE backup strategy if you value the time you have spent collecting / ripping your music.

Recovering a RAID set from data corruption (for instance) can be a horribly difficult task and is often more trouble than its worth.

performance will be diminished

That's not always correct. Reading from (or writing to) multiple drives simultaneously is much faster than reading from a single drive only. RAID can be configured to be extremely fast, and in fact speed is probably the primary reason for using RAID - above the service assurance advantages it provides.

 

[timm]

Thanks tom & amey. And yes I have been googling.