Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Off Topic NAS enclosure buying advice

Terry:

That's a nice setup, but the costs are not cheap and well beyond the needs of the typical consumer... We won't discuss the initial setup which is also beyond the skills of the typical consumer as well.

Not that there's anything wrong with high-end stuff by any stretch of the imagination...

I'm using an older ReadyNAS NV+ and for what I'm streaming (audio and blu-rays) it is performing adequately to the task... I can stream 2 Blu-rays simultaneously which is all I would reasonably expect from this level of device.

I spend too much time managing complexes of servers and storage at work to invest the time on a homegrown solution that I have to manage as well.

Quite true. At the time, building one of these was a little less than $10K in parts, plus a lot of time to get the software exactly the way I wanted it.

Many Meridian customers prefer high-end items, where the cost of one of these servers would be a small percentage of an overall system, and I believe that a reasonable number of those customers are perfectly happy to have a dealer / installer set the whole system up and configure it, so I thought it might be interesting to show what could be done on the high end.

I�m currently expanding my music server to cover video streaming but it will be a considerably more modest system compared to some described above. It may turn out to be an intermediate solution if my video streaming requirement become more ambitious but at the moment I�m planning a system that will have a capacity for about 40-50 BRs which will consist of my favourites plus some titles that have annoying ads that you can�t skip through (Stieg Larsson�s Millennium series comes to mind).

I set a number of criteria for the setup:
- fanless (or inaudible fan noise) as the NAS will be initially in my listening area
- low power (target 30-35W)
- run Logitech Media Server (preferably in Windows)
- flexible power management to enable sleep when not in use
- capacity for at least three 3.5 inch drives

Unfortunately, the above ruled out most off the shelf boxes such as the ReadyNas family which although good products are not quiet. Since I had an ITX motherboard in my current audio server (an Atom based Intel 510MO board ) I decided to look at options to expand that. This MB easily runs Win7 and can take up to 4Gb of RAM. It is also passively cooled, so no CPU fans. A downside of the 510MO is that it has only 2 SATA ports but fortunately a mini PCI expansion card has recently become available which allows an additional two SATA ports to be added which can be configured as a RAID 1.

I�ve only just got the system set up but so far I�m pleased with the result. The mini ITX board fitted easily into a Micro ATX case using existing screw placements and the case is big enough to hold five 3.5 inch drives if required. At the moment I�ve got a 2.5 inch, 750 Gb drive which holds the Win7 OS and all my music (backed up to external drives) and 2 x 2Tb Seagate Green drives as a RAID 1 (which won�t be backed up in its entirety). The power supply is a passively cooled 65W block and the only fans are two low-noise 80mm case fans which are inaudible from more than 2 metres away.

The whole system runs at just 33W when idle which I think is good for a three-drive system (21W when the 2TB drives go to sleep) and if there are no clients attached to the server, it goes into standby after 10 min. When the RAID is active the power rises to 38-40W. No problems streaming BR MKVs so far but I�ve only tested the system for a few hours.

I quite like the passively cooled mini ITX boards as an option to control small servers as they easily have enough horse power to cope with LMS and likely future incarnations of this server. There are also better ITX boards around now which would enable several or bigger raid cards to be installed so a 4-6Tb set up would be feasible.

I found this a very difficult criteria to meet, with any level of storage or speed requires processing power and processing power requires heat. Same with drives.

Agreed. My strategy was to maximise the use of passive cooling and not try and cram everything into a small enclosure. My server box is about 4x the size it was.

Just came across this : http://www.audiosafe.com/

It's being set up by 'Spoon' the guy largely responsible for dBpoweramp one of the best 'backup' tools out there. Basically, it's Cloud-based storage for (mainly) Audio files. Not completely developed yet but speculated to be free to upload whatever amount you like, then a charge as yet unspecified per Gigabyte if you ever need to restore.

Interesting if perhaps slightly flawed concept.

~M~

I wouldn't trust most A/V dealers (of any type) to do systems level work like this. We get back to the fact that most won't have an appropriate background for either the installation or long term management of such a solution.

I've been there, done that with a Solaris based solution and ZFS, so I do know what's involved.