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need help moving to NAS and RAID

Looking for some helpful suggestions and guidance:
I currently use 3 3TB Seagate portable Hard drives, linked via USB to my PC laptop running JRiver 21, and connected via USB to my Playback Design DAC5 as my digital music library. I am concerned that these portable HD's are not that reliable, and would like to migrate to an integrated NAS/RAID storage device, and connect that to my laptop for JRiver access. Please provide some easy thoughts on best method of transferring all my files, creating auto back up, and importing the new library into JR. I am not very computer literate. Also would like recommendations on which brands/devices are reliable, and sound good.
Question 2: I am not that happy with the new Media Center 21...when I access my library via the PC, I used to be able to create new random playlists by opening an album, and only selecting a few tracks...now it doesn't let me; and upon clicking, it moves the entire album to the Playing Now song list...but from iPad, I can still create playlists from specific tracts. Do folks know of how I can regain my prior functionality? The MC forum has not been helpful. Should I consider the new AUrender N10 or N100H instead of laptop and JRiver, but still use the NAS, and RAID? Would it sound better, and be easier to use and import music, and Tidal?
Thanks..just an old fashioned audiophile, trying to deal with these new fangled options of listening to music.
Happy Holidays...
mribob
sc53
718 posts
 
Not sure why you think a NAS will be more reliable than the external USB drives. All drives can fail. SSD drives at least don't have the spinning hard drive, so I've been trying to migrate more to those as the price comes down. I too use JRiver and my Macbook Pro laptop for a music server, but I stayed with JRiver 20 rather than upgrading to 21. I love the way 20 works, and so far, it's still working. BTW I use a Mac so this is JRiver 20 for Mac.
vegasears
1,173 posts
 
Re-ripping huge numbers of music is a pain. I’ve had a few Hard Drive failures over the years so I’ve gone a little back-up crazy.

I use a QNAP TS-251 NAS for whole house back-up’s and streaming ripped movies on multiple smart tv’s. The enclosure is dual bay and configured for RAID 1. It will stream music to iTunes but I currently don’t feel the need. The QNAP was easy to install thanks to a YouTube video produced by the QNAP people. I also use a USB single drive for daily BU’s along with the NAS. Two full daily back-ups on separate devices.

Please note: I’ve previously used a Western Digital “My Book II” NAS devices. It failed within a year but the biggest issue was speed. It was configured wireless and to back-up 750 GBs it took 5 days and crashed at few times. The QNAP did the job in half the time.

When I went looking for an new NAS, Synology and QNAP were the only ones I looked at based on my limited tech skills, needs and customers reviews.
hevac1
812 posts
 
If you are going to build a NAS/RAID make sure you use a UPS. If you pull the the plug or have power failures the system will test the integrity of the drives that make up the Raid configuration when it is powered up again. This can take hours to days depending on system size. Raid 5 is a good way to go but as with most hard drive systems make sure you do a backup. I would not use backup software as that will crunch down your data and for music it may not be restored correctly as it may not be lossless. just do a drag and drop to the external backup drive.
mchad
8 posts
 
Synology NAS' are excellent products.  I use them at my office as a database backup target (they have a great built in replication function that reps to another synology NAS for redundancy purposes).  They are considerably faster throughput then the old WD's they replaced.  Have had several running 24/7 for going on 5 years now.  HD's fail from time to time, but that's to be expected.
russbutton's avatar
russbutton
407 posts
 
I have yet to find an inexpensive commercial NAS which I feel has acceptable performance.  I run Ubuntu Linux on my laptop instead of Windows.  I popped for a new 1TB drive for it as I have only about 1/2 TB of flac music files.

I run a nightly cron job which copies everything on the laptop to a secondary 3TB drive I have on my Linux desktop box.  I also have a nightly cron job which copies everything from the secondary 3TB drive on my Linux box to another 3TB drive which is hanging off of a Raspberry Pi.  Additionally I have an account with Crashplan, which is an off-site backup service and a copy of everything is there as well.  So I have FOUR copies of my music files in various locations.

If I were on Windows, I'd do something similar.  I'd have a large drive local to my laptop.  I'd also have one of those inexpensive commercial NAS drives on the network, but just for backup purposes.  And then I'd also subscribe to Crashplan for their off-site backup service.
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