Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Adding Storage

I have an MC200 and am almost out of storage. What's the best way to add storage? Add an MD600 and keep the MC200 as my core/audio endpoint? I use the digital out on the MC200 to an external DAC right now.

Thanks!

That'll work perfectly. Keep the MD600 out of your listening space if you can (e.g. In a Study wired to a switch or router)?

Use the data in the library stats thread to work out what HDD size you need (now and likely in the future).

Hi,

That would work just fine, however I'd run the core in the MD600, and then you'd have the option to change the MC200 for either a MS200 or MS600 at a later date.

MS200 to drive your external DAC
MS600 has an extremely good internal DAC.

Regards,
Carl

Thanks Gents!

Even if the MD600 was the core driving an MS200 or MS600, it could still be in another room, right?

How much storage could I get with the MD600? 1 TB? Any recommendations on drives? I'm all about sound quality - not sure if the drives used make a difference in that regard.

Is it easy to transfer the music in the MC200 to the MD600?

Many Terabytes and both drives can be used as storage. Takes 3TB drives now and will handle larger as they become available over time. Locating in a separate room is preferable.

No need to transfer unless you remove from the system, but easy to do. it still provides storage capacity in addition to the MD600 if I understand correctly.

The MD600 has 2 drive bays and can be run in two modes (can only be change by Meridian support):

RAID 1: (Default) A mirrored pair, to improve availability should one disk fail.

RAID 0: Where the data is striped across both disks, doubles capacity but zero protection.

Pairs of 1, 2 and 3 TB drives work just fine, it's reported that it is good for up to 10TB drives but the largest manufactured is 4TB. I don't know of anyone running 4TB yet.

Although there is no need to move the audio files from your MC200, I would recommend it so they are all on the MD600 running RAID1. You can then switch off the storage and core in the MC200 and just use it as an audio end-point. Then at a later date swap it out for a MS200 or MS600 to improve audio quality.


Transferring the files is straight forward using Control:PC/Control:Mac, but does take a while; about 20 to 30 seconds per album each way.

1) Backup album files to an external disk *
2) Disable MC200 storage
3) Restore the Backup

Regards,
Carl

* You should be doing this anyway see, Lessons learned from almost losing data

You can also dump the MC200 in favor of the new MS200 and have some extra x-mas spending money. I recently 'borrowed back' my old MC200 and compared it to the MS200 as as analog endpoint and could detect no difference. As a digital endpoint I actually liked the new MS200 better. Didn't try SpeakerLink.

Thanks for your thoughts Gents! It's great that Meridian DMS makes this process so easy! I've kept my MC200 backed up on external hard drive so I'm good to go.

A 3TB RAID 1 configuration should be plenty of storage for me for the next few years at least.

Remember to do a fresh backup from scratch to restore from. If you use an old incremental backup you will get back many things you deleted and possibly see other strange effects (I.e. things you edited may become unedited).

You will loose your playlists. There is a solution though, written up by Ronnie.

Oh, so I need to do a new backup in a new folder on my external hard drive to make sure that back up has all my music?