People here seem to be very interested in black-boxing their music collection, and the topic of which NAS device to use keeps coming up here and there. Some folks have given very useful info but it's a bit scattered among many threads.
I am hoping to focus the above on a specific thread, and in particular to broaden the option to include a do-it-yourself scenario. So I'm going to provide some bytes for the savvy among us to chew on. The reason that I haven't yet plunked down the cash for an Infrant box is that I'm not sure whether I'll be happy with it for reasons having to do with cpu cycles and noise. Since these boxes are not available for review at your local Fry's, you basically have to dive in and buy one before you personally experience it. Regarding the cpu cycles, I am concerned about how slimserver will run with a ReadyNAS (seeing how it eats cpu cycles in my venerable powerbook even with its 1 GB of RAM, it is something to think about); for example, waiting for several minutes or even hours before new additions to the music library show up ready to play. I have read the occasional complaint about this from ReadyNAS users so it's certainly a source of uncertainty. Regarding noise issues, if the NAS device is noisy then it defeats the audiophile raison d'etre of the squeezebox in an obvious way. The alternative is to place the NAS device in a separate room or somesuch, and rig up the network (e.g. good cable layout, satisfactory wireless performance) so that it's still accessible. Doable, but in the end a quiet device would certainly be preferable and give us more flexibility. Apparently the ReadyNAS performs better on both criteria above than the Buffalo and others; however it's a newish market and that may change. The cost of the ReadyNAS barebones is about $600 plus shipping and taxes. I am certain that for that money one can build a barebone linux box of greater capabilities. It's been a few years since I've put together a linux system (Suse 8) and I've never done the headless thing so it would involve some rtfming. I don't know whether I can use Herger's SlimCD to manage a RAID system as well as run the slimserver; that would be an obvious win wrt what OS to install. If you haven't seen it yet you can read about slimcd at http://www.herger.net/slim/detail.php?nr=763&kategorie=slim If you've set up a RAID/Slimserver system using linux and you'd like to comment on what you did wrt software I would appreciate it. Now onto the hardware side of things. The linux box should definitely have room for four hard drives, since RAID 5 hits a sweet spot at that number. One wants to run RAID 5 because it provides a complete backup of the content of any one drive in the array, and because it does so without consuming so much hard drive space in the process. There are other RAID options and in some situations they are the way to go but for "us" it looks like RAID 5 is the clear choice and four drives is a good ergoecotechnomic minimax fit. I don't know if the box should have an additional drive to host the OS and so forth. The advantage of that that I see is that one can then take out the drives and put them in some future container should the need arise, without violating the integrity of the past and future host boxen. Perhaps there is some performance advantage as well to having the system on one drive and the data on another (although I doubt that makes an important difference in our case). Since the DIY cases tend to have plenty of room it is certainly feasible to spend an extra $50 and get a 100GB+ hard drive on which to install linux and whatever other OS tickles your fancy. An extra hard drive not only raises the cost, however, it also raises the noise level (more on that below). RAM is good and cheap and a gigabyte is a nice round number; that's another $100. Motherboard and cpu together will probably go for about $200; I had a look-around at the local Fry's and saw plenty of motherboards for about $100 that have integrated gigabit ethernet (which is helpful), but I haven't considered what it takes to run RAID proper. As for CPUs it's been ages since I looked at the intel side of things (I got off at the Athlon 1.x ghz models) but for a long time it's been the case that you can get a decent "nothing fancy" cpu from amd for at most $100. So on the way to the "barebone" (meaning, before the four RAID drives) we spend about $300 on the motherboard and the stuff that sits right on top of it. The noise reduction require a refined touch, as one has to travel inside the computer case looking for specific noise sources and then invest time, money and elbow grease to diminish or even eliminate them. I've gone to a couple of web sites to get my thinking started along the "quiet" lines: http://www.silentpcreview.com/index.php http://www.endpcnoise.com/ There is a (computer) case that has garnered some nice reviews and it can be obtained for less than $100 (I believe "Radish" pointed it out on these fori): http://www.silentpcreview.com/article116-page1.html Other hardware considerations that I've thought about but for which I have little specific knowledge are: 1. Fan quality makes a big difference; apparently one can invest for ~$10 rather than ~$3 fans and lose a lot of noise. But I've seen ads for fans that cost $30+ so I'm still working on this clue. 2. Hard drives HAVE to make noise, and the noisy ones make a lot of it. Specific recommendations for SATA hard drives in the 250GB+ category would be most apropos. There is a case available that surrounds a hard drive and curtails its noise, but I am concerned about the hard drive heating up (even though the merchant claims that that's taken care of in the design of the case): http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/driveaway_black.html 3. If the linux box can be made to run without a VGA card, then that's an extra fan that doesn't have to run (not to mention a savings of a few bucks). Motherboards seem to have integrated vga now but I don't know if that means running an extra fan. Running headless is better all around wrt the "black box" approach to feeding music to the squeezebox, anyway. So adding up the tab, we get motherboard, cpu, RAM, and case for about $400. Presumably this setup works better than, say, the ReadyNAS (albeit in a larger package), but one still has to rtfm and assemble (or hire someone else to do so, probably for another $100 or so). The hard drives then pop in at one's leisure. The current sweet spot seems to be 400gb (after taking the fixed cost of the box into account), but the 300gb are pretty much in the same ballpark in the $/gb sense so if one wishes to reduce the initial outlay by $200-300 then that option is available. Next year when the 400gbs are cheap (or so I dream) then I can order another drive and keep it in the closet for that fateful day. The 400gb's go for a shade over $200 each so four of them puts the total a bit over $800. [Aside: when the hard drive is advertised at 400 GB it actually only means 372 GB. The reason is a marketing one, having to do with whether one uses 1000 or 2^10 = 1024 as "a kilobyte". The marketing guys use 1000 but the computer uses 2^10 so you need to divide the stated size by 1.024 to get the actual size). So $400 + $800 + shipping/taxes brings the total for the dyi to about $1300. That would of course be a monster storage device at around 1.1 terabytes fully backed up, which is enough room for about 3300 CDs compressed in flac format. This would plug in quietly, efficiently and reliably (because we made it so) into your hi-fi rig, and give you storage for your other data needs. Indeed, this would be a case of the hi-fi gadget that actually helps out with all the other aspects of your daily living, which is certainly a reversal of the usual order. I'll pause now so you can drool a little bit. To sum up, I'd rather go DIY with the headless linux box for performance and compatibility/long-term reasons (after all Infrant could always get bought out by Jobs or Gates and turned into a crap product for some evil corporate reason). The feared rtfm factor sits there waiting, however; and the box does end up being bigger than the ReadyNAS. And who knows, maybe after I finish the DIY it ends up being noisier too! But I'm pretty sure it would run better... ahem, once the kinks were worked out. -- trebejo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18555 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
