[iLikeItInTheEar]

Quote:

Green hard disks I wouldn't touch with a 10ft barge pole. They are just about guaranteed to fail after a year or two. 
 
After spending a year slowly investigating, I ended up using my old MacBook Pro from 2006 that has a dead battery as a NAS with a couple of external eSATA cases. I stuck it in an upside-down "V" position behind the TV so that it doesn't automatically sleep which it will do with the lid closed. No having to worry about what software to use or other issues as I just used the drives I had that already have all my stuff on them. I think down the track I'll get a couple of 3TB drives and make a RAID 1 mirror from them for safety though.

 
Safety? RAID isn't a substitute for backing data up. Think house burning down, thieves, viruses, corruptions (hardware or software). It only offers protection against disk failure.
 
I've never had a WD green fail yet, and I wouldn't care if they did really either. As I said everything that's important to me I keep offsite at work.

 

[iLikeItInTheEar]

Quote:

I have an HP Microserver I paid £100ish for (got £100 off via a cashback scheme), takes 4 bays stock but can be modded to fit 6 drives - I'll probably just stick to 5. Plan was to fill it with drives and run UnRAID but right when I was about to order, the floods in Thailand hit and prices rocketed. Waited a long time for them to get back to something resembling normal again - think I'll go for the WD Reds at this stage, although I'm still waiting for a killer deal to pop up. Idea will be to run both Logitech Media Server on it for my SBT as well as have it as my iTunes library as I'm weird and run a couple of different systems!

 
AKA - NAS Killer. So cheap you can't afford not to buy one
 
Make sure you throw 16GB Ram at it too. Hell, some guys are running VMware on it for labs etc. They're just such a versatile platform.

 

[Currawong]

Quote:

I don't know which version of OSX you have on your 2006 macbook pro, but I use nosleep with my MBP so I can close the lid and still keep it running all its programs.  

 
Ahh, thanks for that. I'd forgotten it existed. The way the MBP is sitting now though is quite stable and it runs much cooler than it did in the normal position it was used. The fans don't even spin up when recoding video. It was useless before for playing music with Audirvana for example, as if you turned up-sampling on the fans would go nuts.
 
Quote:

Quote:

Green hard disks I wouldn't touch with a 10ft barge pole. They are just about guaranteed to fail after a year or two. 
 
After spending a year slowly investigating, I ended up using my old MacBook Pro from 2006 that has a dead battery as a NAS with a couple of external eSATA cases. I stuck it in an upside-down "V" position behind the TV so that it doesn't automatically sleep which it will do with the lid closed. No having to worry about what software to use or other issues as I just used the drives I had that already have all my stuff on them. I think down the track I'll get a couple of 3TB drives and make a RAID 1 mirror from them for safety though.

 
Safety? RAID isn't a substitute for backing data up. Think house burning down, thieves, viruses, corruptions (hardware or software). It only offers protection against disk failure.
 
I've never had a WD green fail yet, and I wouldn't care if they did really either. As I said everything that's important to me I keep offsite at work.

 
That's something I was going to point out and you reminded me of something I'd forgotten: If a disk fails, it's very likely its same-batch, same-box partner will as well.  In actuality I have all my data manually duplicated across a number of disks in different cases, depending on how important it is, and then again using Backblaze.

 

[Somnambulist]

Quote:

 
AKA - NAS Killer. So cheap you can't afford not to buy one
 
Make sure you throw 16GB Ram at it too. Hell, some guys are running VMware on it for labs etc. They're just such a versatile platform.

 
I just added another 1GB stick to the existing 1GB - it'll really only be used by me and do one thing at any one time (mostly just serving music), so it'll probably be fine for that as it stands. It's a cool little device though and superb value for money as long as you're prepared to do a bit more work than you would with something like a Synology.

 

[Argyris]

Amazing. I'd completely abandoned my own thread, figuring I was barking up the wrong tree here or something, and I come back and find over a dozen responses. Oh, well, keep 'em coming. I'll have to pay a bit more attention from now on.

 

[TheAdamUK]

Hi guys
 
Im looking for a little help 
At the moment im using an old lenovo t61 --> FiiO E10 --> chosen Headphones
Until i started delving deeper into the world of Hi-Fi this was fine
im now looking to go down the Music server route but i have a little problem understanding what i need
 
I want to be able to play music ( FLAC files) from a NAS to a headphone amp and to an android tablet but im very confused by it all \

I now have a dedicated listening room where the the NAS and amp will live but need to be able to move about with the tablet
 
Any help would be great 
 
Cheers

 

[Argyris]

Okay, I think I understand what you're after. First off, the NAS is the server in a server-client relationship. Your tablet would be one client in that scenario, so in order to play music on it you'd need some way of accessing your home network and directing whichever music player you choose to the music folder on the NAS. I'll admit that my experience with tablet OSs is basically nil, so I'll be of limited help here. If Android has some sort of file explorer that allows you to browse network locations, see if you can find your NAS that way. If the NAS company has made an app for their product, you could use that to play music, provided it does everything you need it to do. It would automatically find the NAS on your home network, and some might even let you access it over the Internet.
 
Hopefully somebody else with experience with tablets can give you more detailed information.
 
For your other concern, the easiest thing to do would be to set up a computer in the listening space to serve as a client, and then hook your FiiO up to that (I'm assuming this is the amp you're referring to in the line detailing what you'd like to do). Since a NAS traditionally acts as a server, it's generally not meant to have things directly hooked up to it. My own music server is a headless installation of Ubuntu Server 12.04 on an old desktop. I only access it via other computers on the network, which are set to see it as if it were a local drive (the Z drive). This makes it much easier (and in some cases is the only easy way) to direct programs to where the music library is located.
 
As I use Windows, normally my server shows up in the "Network" section in Explorer; in my case it's named NEMO. I mapped it to a local drive letter by using the "Map network drive..." option in the Tools menu. Once that's done it just acts like any normal local drive.

 

[TheAdamUK]

I want to avoid using a laptop as i find having other gadgets distracts me from listening
After more research iv come to find that the squeezebox is a very good music client so i think i will buy that
 
as for the NAS iv bought a dedicated Zyxel unit from eBay but im now wondering if i would need to install any software on it to be able to use it with the squeezebox?

 

[Honkytime]

Quote:

Hi guys
 
I'm looking for a little help 
At the moment I'm using an old lenovo t61 --> FiiO E10 --> chosen Headphones
Until i started delving deeper into the world of Hi-Fi this was fine
I'm now looking to go down the Music server route but i have a little problem understanding what i need
 
I want to be able to play music ( FLAC files) from a NAS to a headphone amp and to an android tablet but I'm very confused by it all \

I now have a dedicated listening room where the the NAS and amp will live but need to be able to move about with the tablet
 
Any help would be great 
 
Cheers

k what media player you use? i use foobar with a foobar2000 controller app made by sergi mola. its available on the  play store if set properly in foobar it will network share the folders that you selected to share play music off the android device and work anywhere that your android device connects to your wifi, also it gives access to your playlists and library. only drawback is foobar needs to be running on your PC to do this all as the PC and foobar are the server and the app is just the controller. i tried a lot of android base control apps and this beats them all.

 

[myears]

I was looking for some networked receivers but after some research I found them kind of useless, they were usually limited in some way and used proprietary protocols. Really, I never tryed any but they look cheesy. Building a solution that suits you is the way.
 
I ended up buying a TEAC AG-790A and using an old notebook with Windows 7 with Foobar to play tracks and radios.
 
Windows: autologon, disabled upgrades, etc, so I don't need to restart it never. Installed VNC Server (free version) so I can operate Foobar from the notebook (using VNC viewer) that I really use.
 
I store my files on my notebook (shared folder, which is accesse from the old DELL note) so there is a huge data traffic when I'm playing msic. That kind of requires me to plug the old notebook to the lan with ethernet cable for performance.
 
The old notebook has a FiiO E10 DAC pluged to it since it comes with a line out that bypasses the FiiO amplifier so it's perfect.
 
 

 
So far it's working pretty fine.

 

[myears]

Quote:

Hi guys
 
Im looking for a little help 
At the moment im using an old lenovo t61 --> FiiO E10 --> chosen Headphones
Until i started delving deeper into the world of Hi-Fi this was fine
im now looking to go down the Music server route but i have a little problem understanding what i need
 
I want to be able to play music ( FLAC files) from a NAS to a headphone amp and to an android tablet but im very confused by it all \

I now have a dedicated listening room where the the NAS and amp will live but need to be able to move about with the tablet
 
Any help would be great 
 
Cheers

 
For the tablet part it looks like you need something like this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ws.plattner.cifsmanager&hl=EN
 
But you can have performance issues, because FLACs are huge files, you will need to try and see if it works fine.