You are correct
Did you have read this article yet?
http://modelpromo.nl/JRiver%20DAS%20Server.htm
It’s about avoiding the problems you have encountered, maybe this article can help you
Best regards,
Audio Dandy
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Would saving things to an app like Dropbox, which is cloud backed up be a potential solution to this? Used to work for a hard drive company in advanced development, and saw the tremendous precision and pushing of the envelope that goes on every year to keep up. HDD are amazing devices. I use SSD these days.
I skimmed it.
- I didn’t have any problems, I feared I would but the Synology got fixed without effort and I had cloud backup and the original on the Nucleus is good and the original on my staging/management PC is good so I was never in danger.
- I felt it was fair to write about Synology doing a good job since I have criticized the NAS concept forcefully.
- As the article suggests I use DAS in music playback, no NAS is involved.
- I don’t use a NAS for anything, other than backup. No need. DAS is fast and simple and big enough.
- I don’t use RAID for anything, other than backup. As I said in the heading and have said for years, RAID is not backup, you need backup anyway, so why bother with RAID? RAID is for business continuity. And even for that, modern cloud computing doesn’t use RAID anymore. I’m still letting the Synology stay the way it is, they way I set it up six years ago (an eternity in this industry) but I’ll probably “un-RAID” it soon, the RAID didn’t save anything, single disks would have survived just as well and would have worried me less, straight forward HDD recovery. A few years ago I set up Windows Spaces on my desktop, which is a form of software RAID, but that was mostly because it was created by my group at Microsoft, intended for corporate use, wanted to see how well it worked in a consumer environment, it was great, but later I removed it and replaced a bunch of RAIDed 3 TB drives with a $300 10 TB drive. Why go to the trouble?
- Music was never much of a problem anyway, that’s less than 2 TB. Most of my backup is photo, and that is also much more dynamic, changes daily.
- Inspired by this discussion, I bought an external 12 TB drive for $250. TWELVE TERABYTES FOR TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS! The replacement Synology chassis, without drives, cost nearly $600. And the external drive is small and light, I can put it in a coat pocket and take it to my son for offsite safety, while the NAS is an appliance. I have a whole bunch of USB drives, but they are smaller which makes data management more of a hassle.
So in brief, I didn’t have a problem, I was never in danger, because of safe protection practices. That said, I would not install RAID or a NAS today, would like to get rid of it but I just sunk $600 more in it, to save the trouble of restoring the data I had on it.
I use iDrive as cloud backup.
Looked at Dropbox one time, got pissed off by their megaphone marketing…
I have a Qnap TS 451+ similar box (albeit one with enough grunt to run Roon as a guest!)
2 x 4TB disks (RAID1 mirror - I’ve lost disks before), an SSD to speed it all on it’s way as a cache tier, and an external 4TB disk it backs up all the files to once a week. All automated 
and I migrated the content from an older one with 2TB disks in it (that was not man enough to run Roon) in the same way you did
RAID most certainly is not back up however (and I am not suggesting the OP is saying this but just for clarity if other stumble on the thread) a NAS drive does not have to be in RAID configuration even with multiple disks.
You can just access and store to each disk individually just as you can for a ‘DAS’ (again for clarity for those that haven’t heard of ‘DAS’ it stands for Directly Attached Storage and simply refers to a hard drive or other medium attached to the physical computer in the traditional manner).
The NAS bit is as robust as plugging a drive in via SATA to the motherboard or via USB to an external HDD - it’s just another way of addressing and accessing the storage. A NAS drive has no greater or lesser chance of dying than a ‘DAS’ drive. You may encounter connection issues but given most people have the NAS in their home with the rest of their kit this is not really an issue.
I rip and store all my music to my PC and then I do not use that instance of it - less chance of it getting corrupted that way. I then mirror the music on a NAS drive with 4 x 4tb drives in RAID 10 giving me 8tb of storage and it is from this that I play the music.
I am looking at an off-site solution as well but have not yet decided on which one to use. Cost is a factor but that is not as important as a robust service.
Interesting. Not my experience. I had my music on Synology NAS (as I have most anything on that NAS) but that caused issues with Roon on a NUC. Now I have an internal SSD in the NUC which can read/write 550 MB/s or so. But it feels SOOO slow compared to the NAS.
Reason? The NAS is on a 10GB network. The Nuc / RoonOS only knows about 1GB ethernet.
So, if your NAS feels slow, it maybe your network? My NAS is superfast. SSD cant keep up on a old-fashioned network port.
I have not complained about speed.
I only dislike complexity.
I don’t want anything in my music system that is more complex than what I would recommend to my economist brother, similar to plugging in an FM tuner into a stereo.
We are not there yet. But every decision I make is colored by that. Reducing box count. Simplicity. I have written about this many times.
Complexity is never good. Unforunatly I had to add complexity because of Roon failing to get files-changes from the NAS.
In our setup the NAS is the centerpiece of the network. It makes everything easy.
I agree with 95% of what you say Anders.
I do have a NAS and it was configured with RAID from years ago, but probably wouldn’t configure it as RAID again if I was starting from scratch.
I also only use the NAS for backup. Nothing else. I have a Nucleus+ with internal SSD for my music.
The price of storage has dropped so much that the cost of external disk storage continues to get cheaper and cheaper vs NAS setups. Almost ridiculously so.
If only used for music backup from a single computer, I would absolutely go external vs NAS. No question.
However, along with music backup, my NAS also provides time machine backup for 5 macs in my house and that is a much simpler setup then an external disk attached to each one of my macs for backup.
Additionally, my Synology makes it super easy to backup my music from my NAS to an offsite cloud service (I use backblaze).
And finally, I do like the fact I have 2 empty disk in the NAS that will auto swap with any disks that fail without my intervention.
It’s the combo of these last three things that does make the NAS still worth it for me in my environment vs just going to external disks.
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The problem of change notification is with the NAS, not with Roon.
This is the NAS not fully implementing the expected behavior of SMB, the file server protocol. Using a PC or a Windows file server works perfectly well, because they implement the SMB protocol fully.
But even so, the solution to that is not complexity, just store the music on an internal or USB disk, and use the NAS for backup. That’s what I do.
Well, thats what Roon claims. I disagree. as any other device picks up changes on the NAS files instantly. Its not the NAS notreporting, its Roon not picking up.
Working with that NAS system since years. I know pretty well how (good) it behaves.
I actually make my own servers using raid6 equivalent built into the filesystem using Debian.
Nobody here speaks of filesystems that prevent bitrot, there are only two I know of in existence, ZFS and BTRFS. ZFS at this point is the most robust but BTRFS is gaining ground rapidly and it has no licensing issues with the linux kernel, on the other hand, using ZFS on Linux opens up the possibility that you could put the array in a BSD server and import it or Sun Solaris for that matter. BTRFS is Linux only and raid 5/6 has a write hole that matters if you do not use a UPS to keep the server running during write changes. These filesystems are Copy On Write or COW which constantly compares multiple checksums and will repair a file on the fly if the checksum is wrong. Backing up to the cloud means you have no clue what filesystem is used. Facebook which is obviously NOT this type of service DOES use BTRFS and there are other large profile services using BTRFS or ZFS. The absolute least secure filesystems prone to corruption are the FAT filsystems which don’t even journal metadata and are prone to corruption due to file crosslinking. Anyone from the DOS days knows exactly what I am talking about. Why this is the most common filesystem for usb sticks and camera storage is beyond me as it makes no sense.
To give one an example of bitrot that most people have experienced but did not know what it was is when you are surfing the web, you click on a picture and only some of it shows, the rest is a grey band. This is bitrot caused by flipped bits. It is also recommended that any server uses ECC memory which would prevent most bits from being flipped and written back to storage in the first place. Some say it is mandatory for ZFS but actually it is even more important on lesser filesystems if anything, nobody will make you use ECC but I highly recommend it for anything that stores even TV shows.
One last thing, COW filesystems actually work best when at least Raid 1 is used as multiple drives are part of how they work by default. Don’t use them on a single partition and think you are fully protected.
Yes, such systems are impressive, Windows Spaces actually implemented such integrity in server 2016, my last year there, I ran it on my home machine, but I abandoned Spaces later.
I’m a cynic — techies (like me) like to control things we can control, but there are a lot more problems at different layers, like burglary and fire and bugs and human error.
A colleague of mine said, the essence of business integrity is apologizing. Transaction management aims to ensure that if a business has only one example of an ancient Chinese vase, you and I cannot simultaneously buy it, because if we did they would have to apologize. But if I buy it and when they are going to ship it, the forklift drops it and backs over it, they will have to apologize. So trying to eliminate technical failures but leave the possibility of real-world failures is not practical. Which is why cloud scale systems address the CAP Theorem with “eventual consistency”.
Which is why I use a single disk in the Nucleus, and a single disk in the desktop, and various backups including cloud.
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this mate lives in West Yorkshire, so defo UK