For my five years or so since switching to Roon I’ve used a WD NAS with smooth opperation. My current one, a WD PR4100 (8TB), recently started corrupting random song files when adding albums to it. All previous content plays normally in Roon, but I need to figure out a different external drive for my music files. With the PR4100 being only a few years old and not cheap, I’m reluctant to buy another WD device right now. That also now has me leaning towards getting an usb HDD instead of a NAS.
My core is on a dedicated Mac mini with everything wired. Looking at Seagate HDDs, I’m not finding anything about specific about speeds. I’d greaty appreciate any recommendations (or warnings) for 10tb HDDs currently available.
is the actual nas corrupting things, or do you have a failing drive? normally you’d just swap out failing disks here, depending on the raid configuration…
I’ve been very happy with shucking WD External drives when they go on sale and putting it into a WD NAS (My Cloud Expert EX2 Ultra 2-Bay 0TB External Network Attached Storage $160 at BB).
You can pick up a Western Digital 10TB Ultrastar DC HC510 used for around $100 (x2).
I have 50k tracks on my Core and this NAS handles files with no issues. I have it wired to an ORBI wireless satellite.
I was worried that the minimal amount of RAM on the WD unit might be an issue but it has not been.
And i’d stay away as far away as possible from Seagates! Ha!
It’s all about the personal empirical research!
On the other hand, i have yet to have a WD fail on me… and i have at least a dozen of them in continous operation.
My experience is that all hard drives eventually fail, when is more luck (or lack of) than anything to do with brand.
If you use WD for 10 years you’ll likely have a failed WD drive. If you use Segate for 10 years you’ll have a failed Segate drive.
It’s like asking which colour on a roulette wheel is ‘best’. People who have recently been winning on red will say red, people who have been losing on red will say black.
More important than brand (among the main brands) is having backups and/or redundancy, so that when your drive fails (hopefully it won’t for a long time) you can get back to where you were.
You are of course correct, but my Seagate drives didn’t even last a month… and two failed almost simultaneously so the data loss on that particular array was 100%… Of course i had backups, so i could restore my data to the fresh WD Array later. This is some 4-5years ago, and i have the same WD drives running today. However, they are not in 24/7 use anymore, since a couple of years.
I have used both Seagate and W.D. and have had some last years and some only last until just outside of the warranty with both makes… Tend to find W.D. a bit more reliable of the two overall even though I have had failures of both makes.
Seems to me that what I have found personally is that W.D. just have the edge for reliability and those figure tend to agree but does not seem to be a massive difference. I have found that if a W.D. has failed while still under warranty then the process to get a replacement is hassle free.
Yes, some song files are ruined when copied to the PR4100. It says that the drives are healthy, and there are no error messages on the PR41000 or the dashboard for it when I run the scan of drives.
When Roon scans the folder and adds the affected albums, I can click through the songs and see that at least one song has a progress bar that shows the right duration of the song but the waveform goes flat in the middle of the song like there’s complete silence for the rest of the track. Sometimes the music is still there past that point where it goes flat, and sometimes it jumps to the next song. Then it usually affects other songs within the album. For those songs the waveform looks normal, but a handful of seconds are missing in one or more places in the in the middle of songs.
The original album folder that was copied to the PR4100 will play properly without issues before being copied to the PR4100 and added to my Roon library.
To rule out failing RAM, I removed the (2) 8gb sticks I put in the PR4100 when I first got it and reinstalled the original (2) 2gb sticks. Prior to switching back to the stock 4gb of RAM, I could copy the same folder over and over and recreate the problem but with different songs from the album. Now it does it to the same song(s) on each attempt.
Also, the files are being copied from a separte Mac mini, not the decicated one for Roon. But if I move the folder to the dedicated Mac mini then copy to the PR4100, the same thing will happen.