A NAS to work with the Logitech Duet?

[Frankie]

Hi Gang

Can anyone out there share some thoughts with me on what would be a good affordable (and compatible*) NAS to work with Logitech's Duet music streaming system? Their prefered system is the Netgear ReadyNAS RND2000 series, but I gather that, while being fully featured, it is apparently excruciatingly slow. I thought the IOMEGA StorCenter ix2-200 might be an alternative but I know nothing of it's performance and in particular, I know of no 'shoot out' reviews that compare the two.

I guess I want 2 x 1 Terrabyte of storage arranged as RAID 1 mirrors, and I want to spend under £300 if possible. What are my best options gang? Your thoughts on this are particularly welcome as money os tight while aspirations are high - so thank you in advance for helping me & informing me (I am a NAS noobie) with this balancing act.

Cheers.

Frankie
* p.s. apparently there exists a list of 'compatible' drives that work with the Logitech Duet, although I haven't been able to find this definitive list online anywhere.

 

[thiggins]

The Duet needs a Squeezecenter server. These are available as add-on modules for all ReadyNAS, QNAP and Synology NASes.

The ReadyNAS Duo is an older model, but would do the trick. Since you're just streaming audio, any NAS will be fast enough.

I would not mess with RAID. Just get a single-drive NAS and put in a 2 TB drive. Make sure the NAS is on a UPS and that you have content on it backed up on either an attached drive or other NAS.
Smart SOHOs Don't Do RAID

A Synology DS110j would do nicely.

 

[Frankie]

Thank you

Hi Thiggins

Thank you, those suggestions & views are very helpful, although I believe the Synology has a problem when it comes to serving 24bit FLAC files at the highest sampling rate, for reasons I read elsewhere but don't have sufficient hardware understanding to repeat here. Sorry to cheat you on a proper critique therefore!

I am also not convinced by your anti-RAID stance (I read your supporting article). The mess you are in if circuitry fails within a HD enclosure and the subsequent lack of access to data applies to ordinary HD's as well as to RAID configured NAS's surely. There may be more to go wrong in a RAID box than a non RAID box, but that argument alone isn't that compelling. Yes, if one of say 2 ordinary HD's fail I still have the other one, albeit without backup, but the true comparrison then would be to compare with 2 discrete RAID boxs; when the circuity in one blows you still have the other. In other words, if a box with a HD in it suffers catasptrophic failure of any component other than disk data corruption, you are up the Swannie just as much with one ordinary disk drive as you are with one RAID disk drive. The advantage of RAID that remains is that one element - risk of data corruption - is insured by the redundancy of mirroring, something a vanilla HD doesn't offer.

Of course the above argument isn't fair either since a RAID system is basically two (in my example) HD's, so we're comparing one with two again. A man could loose his mind appraising this fairly!

In any event, thank you for your thoughts on my problem. I might wait around to see if prices on the Netgear start to fall since you point out it's an older piece of kit these days.

Cheers.

 

[thiggins]

Thank you, those suggestions & views are very helpful, although I believe the Synology has a problem when it comes to serving 24bit FLAC files at the highest sampling rate, for reasons I read elsewhere but don't have sufficient hardware understanding to repeat here. Sorry to cheat you on a proper critique therefore!

The few posts I've seen complaining of problems playing 24 bit FLAC files from ReadyNAS or Synology NASes are due to problems on the player end, not the NAS.
If my math is correct, 24 bits/sample X 44.1 samples /second= 1058400 bits/sec or 132300 Bytes/sec or 129 KB/sec, which is easily handled by any
NAS of the past few generations. And NASes don't transcode on the fly.

I am also not convinced by your anti-RAID stance (I read your supporting article)....

Your points are valid. My basic advice is to never trust your data to a single device, RAID or not.
I'm simply saying that RAID has more opportunities for failure than non-RAID.