New NAS drive

[vkalia]

My old NAS drive seems to be having an issue: it has destroyed 2 hard drives in the space of 5 months. So i am looking to replace it.

Have 2 options: a Synology D220j (my old drive was a Synology as well) or a Western Digital WD MyCloud device. While the Synology has worked well enough all these years, the Western Digital seems a little more plug'n'play - which is a big thing for me, as I am not even remotely interested in configuring/setting up/customizing the damn thing. I just want to chuck my music onto it, and then just listen to it.

Anyone have any experience with how well the Western Digital works as a media server for Sonos and BluOS?

Or any recommendations for an inexpensive device that I can use for this? Something that is NOT a Raspberry Pi - I really dont want to spend my time installing software, configuring stuff, etc. See above.

TIA!

 

[IndianEars]

Do you absolutely need a NAS drive?

Can you use an External USB Drive ?

I use 2 External USB Drives of 8TB each..... one for the music & the second as a back up...

Still works out cheaper, easier to use, (zero setup / configuration) and probably a more reliable solution ....

 

[manek]

Do you absolutely need a NAS drive?

Can you use an External USB Drive ?

I use 2 External USB Drives of 8TB each..... one for the music & the second as a back up...

Still works out cheaper, easier to use, (zero setup / configuration) and probably a more reliable solution ....

I was going to say the same thing….

 

[sachinchavan 15865]

A query: So if you have a NAS, and connect it with wifi/cable to a streamer, would the signal travel directly from NAS to the streamer or from NAS to the computer to which the NAS is connected and then to the streamer? If it’s the latter, then the additional stage might deteriorate the signal.

 

[sud98]

A query: So if you have a NAS, and connect it with wifi/cable to a streamer, would the signal travel directly from NAS to the streamer or from NAS to the computer to which the NAS is connected and then to the streamer? If it’s the latter, then the additional stage might deteriorate the signal.

If the streamer can access the NAS drive, then it would go directly. NAS is a standalone device and not connected to a computer.

 

[IndianEars]

If the streamer can access the NAS drive, then it would go directly. NAS is a standalone device and not connected to a computer.

But a NAS has its own Tiny Computer & Built in Operating System........

 

[sud98]

But a NAS has its own Tiny Computer & Built in Operating System........

True but the file doesnt go to the OS, it moves from one drive in the streamer to the drive/memory in the streamer.

 

[rikhav]

You can make any hard disk or part of hard disk of your PC as a network shared drive.

If it's not for backup one can also access music this way

 

[mbhangui]

A query: So if you have a NAS, and connect it with wifi/cable to a streamer, would the signal travel directly from NAS to the streamer or from NAS to the computer to which the NAS is connected and then to the streamer? If it’s the latter, then the additional stage might deteriorate the signal.

Theoretically it shouldn't matter. The way it works is like this

Directly attached storage on the streamer through sata, usb, ide.
You play a song using your music application. It could be apple music, music player daemon, vlc, foobar, or any local music player. The player will access your music directory to access the file. The moment any program or app tries to access it is done by using the openat() system call. This system is in the kernel and it will open the file by directly using the sata, usb, SCSI or ide interface. The speed at which you can read depends on the interface. For USB 3.0, SATA it will be in few GB per sec. The kernel will fetch the data in blocks and give the data in blocks. The DAC doesn't require data to be processed at high speeds. Even for a 192 Kpbs bit rate it will require the kernel to send data at fraction of the interface speed. So the data will be buffered in memory. The music will actually be played from the buffer. The buffer is always full because the kernel will always have the data ready.

NAS mounted storage on the streamer through wifi or ethernet.
You play a song using your music application. It could be apple music, music player daemon, vlc, foobar, or any local music player. The player will access your music directory to access the file. The moment any program or app tries to access it is done by using the openat() system call. This system is in the kernel and it will open the file by requesting the NFS client code in the kernel. The NFS client code will request the NFS server on the NAS drive to transfer data. The speed at which you can read depends on the network interface and the load on the client machine and the load on the NFS server machine but even for moderate loads it, for 1000 MBPS ethernet it will be 1 GB per sec. For WIFI, the speed will depend on how many devices are connected to the wifi router and will never reach the ethernet speed. The kernel will fetch the data in blocks and give the data in blocks. The DAC doesn't require data to be processed at high speeds. But this speed required is in few kpbs. For ethenet connection (even 10 mbps) you don't have to bother. So again the data will be buffered in memory. The music will actually be played from the buffer. The buffer is always full because the kernel will always have the data ready. The only situation where this may not be enough when you are using wifi and you have multiple devices using the same wifi. If any wifi device other than the streamer does high speed file transfers, etc, it is possible that the kernel may not be able to pull data fast enough to keep the buffer replenished. Also the wifi is a noisy interface. The side effect of a noisy interface like bluetooth and wifi chip on the streamer can cause deterioration. Also remember that putting a ethernet cable made of gold, platinum, etc will not increase the speed of transfer. If you hear any improvement it would be your brain playing tricks. The TCP/IP network protocol has enough error corrections to be affected by the quality of cable for short runs. The only case where an ethernet cable would help is to transfer data over a longer cable without any drop in speed.

For all the above case, remember that the DAC is playing the song directly from the buffer. Whether you use a directly attached storage, ethernet it will not matter. The only possibility of something going wrong is using wifi with bad signal and multiple devices connected to the same router.

 

[sud98]

Excellently explained @mbhangui

I believe there are slight differences in the same when attaching a hdd directly to the streamer as in this case the streamer OS is doing the grunt work of picking from the hdd to the streamers buffer. Depending upon the processor and memory of the streamer there might be slight degradations versus using a NAS.

 

[IndianEars]

FWIW, I am personally convinced that Streaming Hi-Fidelity music from a HDD via Ethernet, sounds better than a USB connected drive.... Ofcourse, that is assuming you have an adequately resolving setup.

Since vkalia said "for Sonos and BluOS" I suggested USB HDD drives.....

(Sonos and BluOS fans, please dont hound me ... its purely IMO)

 

[Kannan]

Another option if you are skeptical on connecting hard drive directly to your streamer is to use a router with USB port and feature to share it on the network.
If the hardrive is only for music and video playback, my suggestion is to not keep the hard disk running at all time and switch it on only when needed to access the files, assuming ofcourse if it is a self-powered drive. Other wise plug it it in only when needed.

 

[mbhangui]

Excellently explained @mbhangui

I believe there are slight differences in the same when attaching a hdd directly to the streamer as in this case the streamer OS is doing the grunt work of picking from the hdd to the streamers buffer. Depending upon the processor and memory of the streamer there might be slight degradations versus using a NAS.

Yes. You can easily slow down the transfer rate even on a raspbperry PI 4. The PIs and these tiny streamer device have an ARM processor that are no where near those on macbooks, intel laptops and PCs. for e.g. on my RPI4, just by enabling encryption, the network speed drops to around 700 mbps instead of around 1024 mpbs.

I have over simplifed things. In reality, apart from the buffer used by the DAC, kernel also has a buffer. Even the hard disk have cache. The NFS server too has its own cache buffer. So most of the time, data is actually flowing from one buffer to another. Also the OS does some cheating. When you request few bytes, the OS will actually fetch more bytes than actually asked so that the next read will already have the data ready in the buffer.

FWIW, I am personally convinced that Streaming Hi-Fidelity music from a HDD via Ethernet, sounds better than a USB connected drive.... Ofcourse, that is assuming you have an adequately resolving setup.

Since vkalia said "for Sonos and BluOS" I suggested USB HDD drives.....

(Sonos and BluOS fans, please dont hound me ... its purely IMO)

A directly attached storage has the advantage of a dedicated channel for data transfer (apart from probably sharing the PCI bus). On RPi3, the ethernet and the usb is shared. On RPI4, the ethernet and usb bus is independent. But ethernet is a shared interface. Any application on the same machine will compete with the fixed 1 Gbps rate.

In the older devices, the usb gives slower speeds (usb 2.0 speeds) either due to cable, etc. So it is possible and this is what I have observered too especially with long usb cables.

 

[IndianEars]

IMO a slow down in USB-2 Speed due to long cable lengths is theoritically irrelevant ....

USB-2 speed is 480 Mbps

Hi Res Audio: 24-192 needs a data rate of around 9.2 Mbps...

 

[sud98]

IMO a slow down in USB-2 Speed due to long cable lengths is theoritically irrelevant ....

USB-2 speed is 480 Mbps

Hi Res Audio: 24-192 needs a data rate of around 9.2 Mbps...

Wont the transfer speed be throttled by the hdd (assuming non ssd or flash drive) and not the usb2 max speed?

 

[IndianEars]

I get 120 Mbps+ via my external USB2 HDDs

Audio needs just 9.2 Mbps

 

[keith_correa]

Wont the transfer speed be throttled by the hdd (assuming non ssd or flash drive) and not the usb2 max speed?

480 Mbps is just the signaling speed of the interface. The bottlenecks are many - the Bus, the host controller, the hardware et al. The actual realistic throughput will probably be less than half the signaling speed.

I get 120 Mbps+ via my external USB2 HDDs

Audio needs just 9.2 Mbps

120 Megabits per second is low - that translates to 15 MB/s. Are you sure about this?

 

[IndianEars]

Maybe its 120 MB ...

That too is the Write Speed onto the external USB HDD

 

[mbhangui]

480 Mbps is just the signaling speed of the interface. The bottlenecks are many - the Bus, the host controller, the hardware et al. The actual realistic throughput will probably be less than half the signaling speed.


120 Megabits per second is low - that translates to 15 MB/s. Are you sure about this?

Good that you brought this up. The TCP/IP layer, the network code always deals with data in bits and not bytes. For the network layer, everything is done at the bit level, things like error correction, receving and transferring. The network doesn't have any idea of how the higher layers at the software layer will deal with the data. All it ensures is that the bit is transferred unaltered. If there is any error, it will retransmit. Also it will keep the speed constant or below the max specs to prevent buffer overrun. So regardless of using an ethernet cable costing few lacs, it will not bother with the cost of the cable. Using a costly ethernet cable, network switch, power supply for the network switch is like buying a car with all safety features and putting an idol or nimbu mirchi to protect you from a fatal crash even if you don't wear seat belts.

Since the network deals with data at bit level, one will always find specs of network devices and network transfer rates in bits per second. Now one byte is 8 bits.. Software (almost all high level programming language) deal with data in bytes and not bits. To use bits, the programmer has to do complicated things and most programmer don't write code to use bits. When you use any function or system call to read/write data it will be in bytes. Hence data transfer rate in software is always specified in bytes per second. You have to divide bits per second by 8 to get bytes per second. For a quick calculation I divide by 10. So 1 gigabit per second is actuall 100 mega bytes per second.

EDIT: Why does the nework deal at bit level. A bit can have just two values. Either a zero or a 1. There are just two permutations and it is easy anx simple to do error correction at bit leve. A byte has 8 bits. You can have 2 raised to the power of 8 = 256, which makes it very complicated to do error correction.

 

[vkalia]

Do you absolutely need a NAS drive?

Can you use an External USB Drive ?

I use 2 External USB Drives of 8TB each..... one for the music & the second as a back up...

Still works out cheaper, easier to use, (zero setup / configuration) and probably a more reliable solution ....

Well, from what I gather, an external HD doesnt provide indexing, album art, etc. For the music I listen to, seeing the album art makes it a lot more convenient for me to pick the music to listen to. The NAS also serves as a useful place for me to back up my photos, my laptop files, etc.

It's a bit ironic, because earlier, i had posted asking about an alternate, non-computer-based music server and was recommended a NAS for this. At that point, I dug up my old NAS and got it working, and ended up liking the benefits it offered. I had/have installed Universal Media Server on my laptop but its a bit of a pain to get it working with my streamers (read: I havent been able to) and also, i dont want to rely on my laptop for music. No real logical reason - just a separation that makes me feel happier. I realize the NAS is also doing some computing work if it is backing up files, etc but it is happening in the background without any active intervention on my part, so it doesnt bother me so much.

@mbhangui - thanks for taking the time to post those technical details. While some of it has gone over my head, I did get the gist of it (i think!). and my experience backs it up: I've not had any issues streaming high-res files off the NAS even when my wife is watching a movie in another room. If the wifi can stream accurate 4k/Atmos movies to my AVR, I reckon it can handle audio, even high-res.

As for BlueOS not being resolving enough to "deserve" a HDD via USB - I have heard the same music in many, many systems over the year and worrying about the resolving power of digital transmission is something that falls purely in the realm of placebo, atleast as far as my ears and i are concerned (this is my turn to say IMO, please dont hound me ).

Anyway, i just ordered a Synology DS220+ drive. Arrives tomorrow.