Goodbye NAS, hello USB drive

Roon Software Discussion
63

My “not really NAS” setup is an older headless Windows 10 Pro PC with a 128gb ssd for the OS and two sata 2gb spinners. One of the big drives is shared for other pcs in the network. It has all my music files and backups from the other pcs on the network.

The second big drive is a backup clone of the first big drive, updated nightly. It’s backed up weekly to a usb external drive, and continuously to Backblaze cloud backup.

Except for Backblaze, all the backups and cloning are done with robocopy batch files run by task scheduler so it’s all automated.

My Roon core pc accesses music files via UNC path name to the music folder on the main big drive. I rip/download directly to the “server” big drive from the desktop pc used for the Roon core. Works like a champ and never had any performance or other problems. Knock on wood.

64

An internal SSD is your fastest option. If you have that stick with it.

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65

I know it goes against common logic, but actually you get more wear and tear on the drives in your NAS when they spin down.
That is why I have set mine to never spin down. I only use the NAS for backup. The Roon Core use USB drives for my music files.

66

I agree with the general comment about human error.

But there is a prevention to the last point: I never delete anything, ever. Storage is free. (I sometimes Hide albums in Roon, safe.)

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67

This is mostly correct (unless you have very long periods of non-use): spinning-up/down too often stresses the drive motor/bearings, as does the change in temperature. I worked in the storage industry for part of my career and experience tells that it is during spin-up where most drive failures occur. But temp changes and vibration are the killers of HDDs.

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68

Some interesting stats collected here, remember these are if data Centre locations and run 24/7 and in air conditioned rooms. Home use would probably be worse conditions and perhaps be worse MTBF rates too

Personally my NAS setups run 24/7 in a room that’s only having if AC maybe 40% of the time

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69

I’m confused. I’ve been using a NAS with around 16TB of music files on it. Why would I switch to a usb drive? It sits in my basement and is connected by Ethernet cable. When a new album drops into a watched folder Roon recognizes it immediately. When you say usb drive you mean external hard drive right? Not some flash drive thing, right. Using a NAS for me has changed everything. I never run out of space and can add more if necessary. Tell me how a usb drive is better. I’m scratching my head here. My NAS is an Asustor AS-6404T.

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70

Don’t be. If you’re happy with your setup, that’s perfect :ok_hand: The discussion is about the benefits (or not) of having one’s library on a USB drive connected directly to the core vs. a NAS in the cellar.

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But what is a usb drive?? An external hard drive connected via usb, correct?

I know those can store a lot of music but the NAS has much more room and it’s network based. I can’t even dream of changing or moving all of my music to a usb drive.

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Yes, an external drive connected via usb. Not even an option for you with a 16TB library!

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Yes, the discussion is about an external hard drive connected via USB port. They range in size up to about 14 TB ( which I found for sale for just about 260 USD - so potentially quite a bit cheaper than a NAS).

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The WD my book duo USB drive goes up 28TB now. USB is still an option with 16TB music.
I use 2x8TB in a USB3 Dock.

75

I have both an internal SSD and an external HDD in/connected-to my Nucleus.
The SSD is clearly faster from ‘rest’, and the SSD plays instantly all the time. My HDD goes into ‘sleep’ mode after around an hour, and once in sleep mode it takes a few seconds to wake, and start playing files. A little irritating, but not a major problem. However, once ‘awake’ the HDD seems almost as quick as the SSD.

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76

Thanks, Martin. That’s kinda what I thought might happen, even though I don’t have an externally directly-connected hard drive to my NUC core. (I do have a connected USB thumbdrive, but that’s only to serve as one of the DB backups)

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77

Don’t be. You are doing just fine.

One thing people neglect to think about with a USB attached drive: time to re-copy files on drive failure.

When your library starts to hit the multi-terabyte range, the time to “restore” your library to a new drive after failure starts to get long. For me, if I have a HDD failure in my NAS, I can keep listening to music (and watching movies, in my case) while I insert a new HDD and let it rebuild in the background.

You can also do this with direct attached storage (e.g. Drobo), but in the context of this discussion, folks are advocating use of a single disk USB drive.

78

My view is you should use a NAS for backup and local storage - ideally an ssd attached to your Roon core machine - for optimal music play performance. With this setup if by chance you are affected by a ssd failure which is pretty rare, you can always temporarily point your Roon core at the NAS copy of music while re copying the files to a new ssd.

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79

I have a relatively humble library of ~1.2TB FLAC files. My current setup is an SSD on my Ubuntu Server NUC core machine, and an rsync mirror on a Synology NAS. I regularly backup the NAS to portable drives with HyperBackup, and keep at least one offsite. I also automatically backup all the FLAC files from digital downloads from the NAS to Google Drive also with HyperBackup. A bit kludgy, I admit.

80

Oh, NAS, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

The NAS is a complex device (call it sophisticated if you will) and requires management. The SSD I dropped into the Nucleus does not. How many hours have I spent managing the NAS? Including the learning curve, figuring out what managing a NAS entails, and finding my way around the NAS UI (I refrain from decorating that sentence with adjectives, of which I have a lot of good ones), and recovering from the mistakes I made.

Is it just me? Am I stupid in the ways of managing a NAS? Go back over this thread, and the rest of the forum, and look at all the clever-pants and their sophisticated tools and techniques and discussions of recommended best practice and comparisons of performance and reliability and availability characteristics of different technologies and configurations. I rest my case.

What about the benefits of RAID drives in the NAS? RAID is about business continuity. Somebody here talked about being able to continue to listen to music while rebuilding a failed drive. Is this a serious problem? How often do you lose drives? I like that for my bank, but my music?

RAID is not backup, you need backup anyway, and you need offsite backup because on-premises backup is vulnerable to fire and water and theft and lightning. Cloud backup is easiest, you could set up your own (clever-pants). Should you also have local backup? It’s quicker to restore from local backup, sure; restore is important, I told my colleagues their whole industry was mislabeled, it’s not about backup, it’s about restore. So you can do local backup, but that doesn’t need to be a RAIDed NAS either, just another USB drive. And it isn’t a big deal anyway because the SSD is very reliable so this whole restore thing is rare, you may never have to do it at all, it is super important but rare.

So do an SSD plus cloud backup. Easy and protected. Think cloud backup is expensive? Sure, you can save money by doing your own thing, if you don’t value your time and if you don’t count error probability. Anyway, education is expensive, but try ignorance.

Of course, as @Krutsch and others have said, if you have a NAS already and it works for you, fine, congrats. But even in that case, I sometimes go back and simplify, because I know I will be sucked into future complexity.

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81

I copied lossless FLAC ripped CD’s to a 1TB SSD in Nucleus+. I have all that music backed up in three different places, including a RAID NAS. I’ve removed the NAS and have it stored elsewhere. I am using a 256GB USB to back up the Roon database every four days. First full backup took less than 6GB, so the 256GB USB will be overkill. Don’t plan to be buying anymore CDs or buying HiRes files, just streaming, so no need to back up the SSD. NAS can sleep in the storage room forever, and the backup hard disk is in the home safe, so I think I’m good to go. Happy to take the NAS out of the system as every time I lost power (PEPCO sucks), I’d have to find it again on the system…ugh! Happy with USB for backup.

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Drives that are not spun up can fail too…bearings seizing and other mechanical issues. You cannot just park them in a safe and hope for the best when the day comes you need them. SSD can also lose data over prolonged power down too.