Yep, an actual hardware squeezebox is one that I am considering. Currently, I see its only drawback being that it is a discontinued product. Other than that, I think it would do the things I want.

In fact, it seems very attractive even considering the discontinued-hardware issue.

In the meantime, are there other options equal to squeezebox that would satisfy the same sort of need, but which aren't discontinued products?

Software-based. Otherwise, no, nothing quite like it.

Oh, one more for you Tony. It's already been implied, but might as well just say it. If you have any empegs lying around, you can always run Squeezeslave on them.

Like this guy: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?89844-Vanputer

So, if I'm getting a Synology NAS, what kinds of drives should I populate it with?

If I was going with actual Squeezebox client hardware, should I get Squeezebox Touch units from Amazon or Crutchfield?

I use 3x 3TB Western Digital WD30EZRX drives in mine, in a RAID5 configuration.

RAID5 sounds like the way to go. Have you ever had to replace a drive on the NAS, and was it a fairly painless procedure when it happened?

And I wanted to clarify my question about the Squeezebox clients above, too, since I worded it poorly. Here's my re-worded question:

If I was going to get some squeezebox clients, should I get the Squeezebox Touch models, or some other models? I see some older ones available used on Amazon with VFD displays. But I can get the Touch units on Amazon, Crutchfield, or elsewhere.

I replaced a drive on my Thecus NAS last year. It was simple, but you do have a period of some hours while it's rebuilding the parity info where access is a lot slower.

And I misspoke -- I'm not actually using RAID5, I'm using Synology's "Hybrid RAID" which is much more flexible when you're replacing drives, adding larger drives, etc. I haven't had to replace a drive on this one yet, but when I do, it'll be nice knowing I won't have to use a drive of the same size (or waste the extra space beyond the size of the smallest drive in the array.)

I don't have an opinion on the Squeezebox question -- I still use original Squeezeboxes with the empeg-esque low-res display, and haven't really looked at the rest of the lineup recently.

That Synology hybrid RAID looks pretty snazzy. I can upgrade disk sizes over time without having to replace the whole thing.

With these hybrid setups you'll still always be wasting the difference between the size of the largest drive and the next largest if you're only replacing a single drive in a single drive redundant array.

Put simply, adding a single drive to the system that is bigger than all the other drives will not increase your usable storage space. You will have to swap two drives and the space gained is about equal to the difference in storage of the smaller of the two over top of what it's replacing (if the two replaced drives were the same size to begin with).

It's the same for ReadyNAS' XRAID and Dobo's DroboFS.

Tony, I like the look and functionality of the "classic" SqueezeBox 3. If you don't think you'll need a display at all, you might go for a SB Receiver. Otherwise the main advantages with the Touch are that it's controllable right from the unit itself and it can also run a mini-server allowing you to connect storage directly to it.

There's always the unRaid software -- a much better idea for huge drives, but it does require a little bit more interaction to get it set up.

When I see listings on ebay and web sites for "Squeezebox Classic" is that the same as Squeezebox 3?

And, if I'm buying from Ebay, is there anything about them that I should need to check, other than that they work and have the power supply included?

Classic: Yes
eBay: That the VFD still has good brightness level. The product should come with a small AC adapter and a hand-held remote.

Tony, you should get the Synology DS2411+ w/ 12 bays. Nice.

http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-Diskless-Attached-DS2411/dp/B0057LA7KU

You might want to use the Western Digital WD30EFRX 3TB drives instead. This is the 'Red line' of products instead of the 'Green line'. The Reds are specifically manufactured for use in NAS'es (or other RAID setups). If you're going to setup an unRAID server, then forget I mentioned this and use the Green line range.

I went with the "green" drives because they were significantly cheaper at the time. I do know that the Synology firmware disables the "idle3" timer in Green drives that causes some problems with NAS operation, and that they fully support the green drives in RAID configurations. I'm sure there are other differences between the "red" and "green" lines that make the former better for NAS usage, but I've been pleased with the throughput on mine, FWIW.

Anyone know what those differences are? I'll need to select some drives, too.

I'd say buy based on pricing/warranty and make sure that the drives are tested and approved by your NAS manufacturer.

I only use Seagate drives in my NAS and have been quite happy with them since 2009. I started with 4 1.5TB drives (yeah, THOSE 1.5TB) and then upgraded to 6 2TB drives. I've replaced 2 drives that started to grow errors as reported by SMART, the second one only a few weeks ago.

The only WD Green drive I have (in use) is a 2GB that I originally bought to test in the NAS but it just didn't behave, so I ended up using it in my Apple Time Capsule. It died and was replaced under warranty. The replacement seems to be doing fine at the moment, back in the Time Capsule. The original Time Capsule drive is also a WD - 500GB Caviar, which sits in an anti-static bag on a shelf as a sort of emergency backup. I can't really think of anything to do with drives under 2TB anymore. The 1.5's all live in my PVR server now.

TL;DL summary of the other thread:
Vibration preventive tech (movable counterbalances), shorter timeout when trying to recover bad data, longer warranty.

If you haven't bought yet, Ars posted a lengthy review of a Synology unit the reviewer used for months.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/synology-ds-412-is-fast-fun-and-flexible/

The home NAS market overall is in a great place these days. I've made use of my ReadyNAS a few times during this trip, including setting up a source control server on it yesterday. All the flexibility of Linux under the hood with most of them, but without the need to set it up from scratch if that aspect doesn't appeal to you.

Especially for vendors. The one aspect that's still in a bad place for consumers (and ARS pointed this out), is price. No matter what vendor you choose, the prices are significant when looking at hardware component costs.

And you can't build anything even remotely similar to a commercial NAS yourself unless you want to invest heavily in developing your own custom software. There's nothing available in the open-source space that compares (in any way) to the proprietary software on these products. So you'll in fact lose a lot more than ARS indicates by going DIY, including living with a fraction of the performance of commercial solutions and losing the ability to easily migrate disks.

Just recently, spurred by this thread, I started looking at DIY possibilities and the conclusion I came to was that nothing is quite right. The best compromise seems to be UnRaid if performance is of no concern (because it's absolutely terrible) and you can live with only a single redundant disk.

Otherwise figure on spending at least $1000 to go with Synology or ReadyNAS.

Thanks for the link to that review. It includes an important bit of information about which disk drives he used:





This was an exceptionally good explanation of the reason why specific drives are important. Also, he said this which was very good information:



Thanks again!

That's interesting, because the NAS manufacturers (Synology and NetGear/ReadyNAS) fully support desktop drives in their products and don't include these kinds of warnings in their drive compatibility lists. I don't think the issue is as explained when using these products specifically. In other words, they're designed to work on a wide assortment of drives, including standard desktop drives.

If the author was seeing disk failures every 3 to 4 months with the Drobo, maybe it was time to switch NAS platforms a lot sooner - or drive brands.

I do know the ReadyNAS does specific tweaks to the Green drives, in line with what Mark Lord advises. And I haven't seen mass failure stories about the Green drives on the ReadyNAS forums. It's possible the Drobo doesn't do anything special, leading to the issues the Ars person saw.

I've run desktop/green like class drives in all 3 of the ReadyNAS units I've had with no major issues. Each time, I just make sure the drive is on the compatibility charts. Just a failure here or there within normal. I do avoid Seagate now, but purely based on their lack of advanced replacement for failures now.

Heh. Funny, very funny.

Just about all NAS products, "home" or "commercial", are based on (as in like, 90% of everything) Open Source software. Usually on top of Linux, FreeBSD, or (more rarely) Solaris. All of the NAS functionality comes from the Open Source parts, and normally just the management interfaces are closed source.

I work on the insides of some rather Big Name "commcercial NAS" thingies, and it's just Linux in there ticking away. But not with a puny Marvell CPU like in a lot of "home NAS" boxes.

Cheers

Mark

Can you show me an open source NAS that supports that magic RAID stuff across multiple different size drives ala Drobo, X-RAID etc that the commercial solutions have?

Sure underneath there's mostly open source but when I was looking at NASes, resizing/moving around partitions in a simple manner really wasn't possible without digging into the command line and working it out yourself.

Whilst open source may be 90% or more, it's that last 5 or 10% that makes a big difference. If it was really that trivial surely someone would have done it already.

It's that last 5-10% that's worth the millions of dollars in revenue. And that last little bit has thousands of man hours behind it.

I didn't mean to imply that the commercial products weren't built on top of open source platforms - they ALL are. But that there is no pre-packaged open source solution that does what the commercial products do. So you'll have to get the base open source platform and tools, then you'll have to spend probably the rest of the foreseeable future working on a custom solution to that last 10% - or pay someone else to develop it ($1 million? 2 Million?)

OpenFiler? No. FreeNAS? No. Etc.

That's better. I was simply responding the earlier quoted absurdity: "nothing available in the open-source space that compares (in any way) to the proprietary software on these products."

The management interfaces are what make these things saleable for high markups, no question. I'm not a user of "purchased NAS" or even "free NAS specific" systems of any kind here, so I cannot really suggest any good packages simply because I've never researched them myself. I do work on internals, but not the management interfaces -- too high level for me.

I dunno what Drobo and the like are presenting to the user, but their RAID stuff underneath is nearly 100% stock Linux (kernel) capabilities. This includes instant filesystem snapshots, file versioning, rollbacks, RAID (all levels), etc.

Cheers

I'm not familiar with the management interfaces of any of these products, but the "RAID stuff across multiple different size drives" phrase caught my eye. My understanding, from a friend who uses a Drobo NAS, is that most of them limit the RAID capacity to multiples of the smallest drive currently installed.

So when upgrading, by installing larger drives in place of smaller ones, the new larger capacities don't normally become available for use until all drives are upgraded. Then the management software simply does an on-the-fly "filesystem resize" (standard Linux feature) to add the extra capacity into the pool.

But no, I can't help with the original question, as I simply don't use "NAS" management stuff of any kind. Here, I just have a box running Ubuntu, and I add drives to it as needed, and it all just works without fuss. But I don't even use RAID myself -- too complex and the rebuild times are total insanity with modern TB+ drives. Instead, I just stick with periodic filesystem mirroring to a set of backup drives.

Edit: for a lot of people, I expect the "unRAID Plus" NAS software is a lot more appropriate than any kind of RAID when dealing with huge TB+ drives.

Edit2: Or even just their packaged hardware+software systems -- way more expandable than most others I see out there, and without the nasty RAID rebuild issues.

Cheers

But you can't write or read to/from unRAID at 80MB/s, let alone 100 or more.

That could well be true, as it is for nearly all small NAS boxes. That's another reason I don't bother with "NAS" here.

It depends what you mean by "small" - the ReadyNAS Pro holds 6 drives and it's about the size of a shoebox, relatively small compared to a full PC case. 80MB/s on a single GigE port is readily achievable.

It looks like FreeNAS has come some ways in the past few years - just started looking at it again today. With support for ZFS and what should be a relatively painless installation (there are a number of install guides). Then there are also a few alternatives which sound a little more challenging, like OpenIndiana and Nexentastor (wow, what a name). Performance is up on all of these compared to a few years ago, so too is the usefulness of their management UI's.

Nice enclosures with drive caddies still cost a premium, so there's really no way around that. eBay has some interesting deals, but I don't know how the hardware will stand up in the "real world." 16 drive rack-mountable system ready with support for 12 drives - using the other 4 requires a controller upgrade.