Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Low energy NAS box recommendation

Ian
when you do your rips, have a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/album-art/ for artwork. I've used it for a couple of months now and it's by far the best tool I've seen for this job. Really excellent and thorough.

Keep us posted on progress & experience Ian!

Have a good one all.

Hi again Ian,

I run a WD mybook 1tb NAS on my sonos system its ok if your only putting on a few albums 100gig or so. I find that it has to be rebooted fairly often as the drive sometime becomes unavailable on the network and the sonos doesnt see it(the only way to sort this is reboot which takes a minute or so). Generally its ok but the access time really gets on my nerves. My brother filled his 1tb wd drive up and the performance was some what restricted. Slow access time/delays whilst searching.

They are a cheap NAS and you get what you pay for (slow processor speed etc).
My brother got rid of his wd drive and bought a Qnap drive in the end and stuck in 2 2tb drives and it works a treat. No longer any of the issues that were there previously.

I will soon exchange my mybook for a Qnap and have done with the WD. Mine is an eairly blue circle edition so i am not sure if improvements have been made.

Not my favorite piece of kit i am affraid

Tim

I heard about the problems with the blue circle version. The new white light version is meant to be much faster - 3x iirc which makes it comparable on speed with the likes of the Netgear ReadyNas duo apparently so I hope that speed is not an issue anymore.

As its going to be dedicated music file server, its going to be twiddling its idle bits most of the time and the drive is going to stay relatively empty. A bit different if it was going to be doing continuous shadow copies, backups and file shares etc. I've already got a couple of NAS boxes for that, which I can now physically turn off when I don't need that capability.

On paper, it would appear that some cheap NAS boxes have got to the level of functionality and performance that a couple of years ago were the realm of more expensive machines and are a few steps ahead on power efficiency.

If it doesn't work out, Amazon have got a decent returns policy

Reading the spec of your drive it does seem better than mine so hopefully its more stable too. One good thing is they are easily reprogrammed to make them a server allowing full access/transfer of files over the web. Yes you have the software supplied but it did not allow transfer of MP3,mp4,avi....(the list was long)unless on home LAN. This might of changed now but at the time i bought mine that was the case.

Let me know what the new one is like

Tim

I'm wary of WD external drives after having had a WD USB MyBook fail on me and hearing that this is not exactly uncommon. The trouble, presumably, is the less than ideal heat dissipation - but this is a problem with many external drives. Having said that, the WD Green Power HDDs have lower power consumption and therefore run cooler than 'normal' HDDs so they are an ideal choice for an external enclosure.

Actually I am thinking about NAS myself but haven't made up my mind yet. There was an earlier thread on the subject which makes interesting reading:

https://www.meridianunplugged.com/u...bb=showflat&Number=98098&fpart=1

Hi newbie here but I've been a Sonos user for 4 years now (Squeezebox previously to this) and I use a Buffalo LinkStation Mini 1.0TB 2.5" Shared Network Storage with DLNA server

This is silent (no fans), cool to run and has never ever failed as I plug it into a SOHO UPS.

Software:
+ Easy CDDA Converter for ripping to FLAC
+ Tag&Rename to get all the metadata correct

I hope this helps,
Alan

Anyone use Vortexbox? Looks quite interesting but I wondered if it worked well in practice

http://vortexbox.org/buy/

Cliff

Features

Convert an old PC to a CD ripper / jukebox / NAS in 15 minutes.
Based on Fedora so it`s easy to modify.
Automatically tags all files from online music database.
Automatically downloads the cover art.
Automatic sharing of file to SMB (Microsoft) file shares.
Automatic re-indexing Squeezebox Server after every CD is ripped.
AppleTalk - for OSX or Bonjour for Windows.
DAAP - Automatically shares all MP3s for streaming to iTunes and Roku Soundbridge.
NFS - For Linux boxes and almost anything else, Solaris etc.
DLNA - ushare pre-installed to support DLNA players, XBOX 360, etc.
Easy installation of mplayer for AlianBBC support.
Good support for Sonos.
Works well as a backend server for XBMC (XBOX Media Center) running on XBOX, Widnows, OSX, AppleTV, or Linux.

I have has this little unit in my possession for a couple of days and thought that I would give a 'brief' review of the unit from the perspective of a cheap low energy NAS box which has the sole purpose of hosting my music collection for Sonos and iTunes.

Since moving house a couple of months back, I have had to buy a number of new appliances and I have concentrated on low energy consumption for units that are either on 24/7 or will be left in standby. This was also my requirements for a new NAS box so I could rerip my CD collection to FLAC, having previously ripped to 192k MP3 back in the days of being limited to ~50GB of music storage. I already had a few NAS boxes, but they were 3-5 years old and not from the energy concious days, so I though a dedicated music NAS box was in order. My old PC/music setup consisted of a legacy PC running squeezecenter, a NAS box or two, with music collection, backups, file shares, shadow copies etc etc and an G68/G98 + 5xDSP/M33's/D1500. This ran to 200W standby power and even powering my Meridian system from an X10 appliance module, standby consumption was still well in excess of 50W, not a huge amount by yesterdays standards, but a significant draw by today's standards.

Since moving, my music system now consists of 2xDSP5200's running on X10 (20W each standby current) appliance switches and a Sonos 2 zone setup. I have not performed specific power checks on the Sonos other than checking it against a power block which also ran a phone and wireless router - estimated power consumption 5-10W. The final piece was the replacement to my general purpose NAS box to a low energy music only NAS box. For this, I decided on a Western Digital My Book World Edition NAS box - for those comparing reviews, its the one with the white LED light and not the blue circle. As my music collection is around 400CD's, I decided to go 1TB single drive unit - more than enough storage for a CD collection twice the size and I already have backup available and am not a great fan of proprietary RAID formats that are used by some NAS boxes which render the enclosure rather than the discs as the weakest link.

The first thing I noticed about the WD was how small it was, although surprisingly thick and heavy - about the size of a small hardback dictionary but much heavier. Build quality looks very good; its plastic, but well designed plastic. The only slight disappointment was the power supply, but I'm just being picky as I don't much care for plug mounted power supplies. It comes with what looks to be a European alternative plug adaptor which I guess, along with the multilingual but sparse manual, allows it to be called 'World Edition'. Hidden away inside is an energy saving WD 1TB drive.

All in all, not bad for under �115 incl. delivered.

The first thing that I did was quickly run through the settings. I am quite familiar with NAS boxes, but it is nice to see how NAS boxes have come on in the last few generations. This one came with a Twonky DLNA server and iTunes server, the latter was a new concept to me and whilst I was not looking for this in the spec, I can see it will give me a benefit. It also comes with a copy function, to allow a GUI based copy between internal disc and an attached external USB disc. This was always a bug bear with my old HP Media Vaults, where to perform disc to disc copies, internally within the unit, or to an attached USB drive, you had to run and keep a telnet session going and run a unix command which was all to easy to mis specify and risk overwriting the wrong data.

I set up a couple of users giving Sonos and PC access for CIFS protocol only and switched to static IP addresses, but otherwise everything was configured very straight forward, including a firmware update. I did not use any of the supplied utilities as this box has a single function so I didn't want to load bloatware for functions that I was not interested in.

The user interface however is no speed demon and switching between screens can be quite sluggish. But this was not the case with disc access. I was a little wary of using a budget box that cost less than a bare secondary raid disc of smaller size did 3 years back. To 'retire' my old NAS box from music duties, I copies my iTunes MP3 collection across between NAS boxes. In total 6288 items, totallying 25.8GB transferred in a little under 1 1/2 hours, which is about 17GB/hr, NAS(1Gb) to NAS(1Gb) via switch(1Gb) and a Vista PC (100Mb) which was running CAD design software at the time. I think that this was an honourable achievement although I am sure some will look at the plain numbers of 136Gb/hr, well less than a 100Mb/s network can handle, let along a GB network and have a right old moan about performance. Last time I looked, this performance is well in excess needed for a many zone Sonos setup - around 600MB/hr is needed for uncompressed CD by my calculations and the WD NAS achieved a write throughput of about 28 times that, but happy to stand corrected on this, but I don't think performance is going to be an issue, even under non ideal conditions.

As far as reliability is concerned, its obviously too early days. But the unit does appear well built and runs thermally cool, even though fanless. As far as noise is concerned, its very quiet, whisper quiet. Not silent, but I was not after silent, just something that did not resonate on the shelf. This unit far exceeds my needs, but I'm not going to go sticking it in my listening or bedroom.

Now, the main requirement, energy efficiency. I left it configured for auto standby. Some units have timed standby/shutdown regimes, but I have read mixed reports on the effectiveness of this. Also my experience is that auto standby is also hit and mix, although I blame this on the bloat supplied with some drives which interrogate the drive and do not allow it to sleep. Also, with the Sonos, I had no experience of its power requirements and whether it polled the drives regularly to keep them awake. Well it seems that my fears were unfounded. The WD NAS has been on since the morning when I rebooted it with a watt meter attached. During startup, which take about 3 minutes according to the manual, the meter did briefly blip at 16W whilst the drive span up, but then settled down to between 6W and 8W and there it settled, even when playing music. Having returned from a trip out, the WD had obviously gone into standby mode and was drawing a measly 4W of power, but now my PC is back on and Vista has polled the drives, its back up to 6W (and 1/2 hour later, back down to 4W). I would have been happy at 10W, but this little unit exceeds my expectations and I am more than happy to keep it running 24/7.

So to briefly sum up this little budget NAS box. It far exceeded my expectations on power requirements, is quieter than I needed it, runs cool, appears well built and would appear to have enough oomph to support multiple Sonos zones of uncompressed CD audio. At �114, it's a result and will hopefully not let me down reliability wise. But in that eventuality, I already have an investment in a backup solution, which may not be the case with some users just starting out. With the web interface for USB copies, I may just treat myself to a dedicated USB backup drive and give my old NAS boxes a bit more free space.

With the aid of X10 switches for my DSP speakers, my two zone Sonos music system + NAS now consumes about 10-15W in standby. Not bad from my previous 200W requirement.

Ian,
that's really helpful. If you were still an SB-boy rather than a Sonos-boy, could you load slimserver easily onto it ?

thx

It would probably die under the load. Even boxes like the ReadyNAS have been known to struggle, particularly when it comes to re-indexing your collection.

I did a check to see if anyone had done it and drew a blank - the original blue circle model got quite a lot of bad press on speed, but this seems to have been addressed with the new white light version.

Whilst I see an immense benefit of running Slimserver on the NAS, especially on a unit with so little power requirements, I do doubt its mainstream use. The WD book is apparently similar in speed to the ReadyNas Duo, but I suspect that RAM qty and processor speed with be highly influential on the units capabilities. I don't know what these are with the WD unit, but I suspect that the answer is something along the lines of not alot of RAM and 300-400Mhz ARM processor. The reason why I eventually gave up on Squeezebox was that my old PC server, which was a 500Mhz P3 with 512MB RAM, simply ground to a halt under all the slimserver updates. I would always worry the same about SM being installed on a NAS box.