Music Storage

essex-commuter

I've talked about similar topics before and I know there is a fair bit of knowledge on here so..

I currently have a pair of Sonos 5's. My music is currently stored on a laptop which is wireless to my router, my router has the Sonos Bridge plugged into it.

I want to store my music in a better way, I don't want to have the laptop on all the time. Broadband in my area is pretty poor, I can't really go down the 'cloud' route.

Would a NAS drive still be my best option? Is there not such a thing as a router with a USB socket into which I could plug a storage drive?

greg66_tri_v2.0

Both of those will work.

Netgear WNDR 3800/4500 both have USB ports for hard drives (although in the end, I decided it was easier to set up my external USB drives through a USB hub sitting off the main PC. IIRC Win 7 won't let you add network drives to its Libraries, or some such).

NAS drive is probably a better solution.

nicklouse

TBH look at the Sonos forums and see what they recomend as i have heard of some problems.

but yes NAS or USB HD into router should be fine.

I have 3 Squeezeboxes running off a Ready NAS Duo.

Wrath Rob

I've not got Sonos but I've got 2 storage solutions for my music. First is a Netgear ReadyNas Duo with 2*2TB drives, set up as RAID 1, i.e. one drive is a backup of the other. This is plugged into the router and operates both as a simple drive but also as a media server to other devices, e.g. the WDTV Live and the XBox.

The 2nd is Google Play Music. 20k songs stored in the cloud for free and you can listen to them anywhere you've got a net connection. Not so much use for Sonos unless they hook into it, but great for carrying your entire music collection around with you.

PBo

I have LOADS of music on these little silver discs thingies....they work even when my broadband/wifi is down!!

daviesee

A word to the wise, although I may be stating the obvious.

Get at least one back-up drive.

You just know that something is going to go wrong some time.
I have one at home and one in the office in case of fire/flood etc, etc. Handy for listening to music while I work too. :P

veronese68

PBo wrote:

I have LOADS of music on these little silver discs thingies....they work even when my broadband/wifi is down!!

Silver discs you say? I have black plastic discs with a little groove that goes round and round. Store them on shelves.

rjsterry

PBo wrote:

I have LOADS of music on these little silver discs thingies....they work even when my broadband/wifi is down!!

Yeah, mine are stored on my, um, shelf. It's made of wood.

walkingbootweather

"Ah, no, no clues!"

sketchley

I have 2GB buffalo terrastation live raid 5 nas box, with added Twonky. No idea if that'll work with Sonos, but it does the job for me, streaming to PS3, phones, ipad etc while also providing nas shares for the PCs.....

nicklouse

rjsterry wrote:

PBo wrote:

I have LOADS of music on these little silver discs thingies....they work even when my broadband/wifi is down!!

Yeah, mine are stored on my, um, shelf. It's made of wood.

my streaming works if the internet does not. and I have lots of silver discs.

and a lot of larger discs with grooves in them. they are not all black.

sketchley

I have a lot of black discs, over 1,000 of them maybe more, not counted them for a while.....

rjsterry

Sketchley wrote:

I have 2GB buffalo terrastation live raid 5 nas box, with added Twonky. No idea if that'll work with Sonos, but it does the job for me, streaming to PS3, phones, ipad etc while also providing nas shares for the PCs.....

If I didn't know better, I'd swear you made them up.

PBo

walkingbootweather wrote:

"Ah, no, no clues!"

I haven't even clicked on the link, 'cos it's one of my favourite sketches..

"Do you want slimline salad dressing?..."

PBo

rjsterry wrote:

Sketchley wrote:

I have 2GB buffalo terrastation live raid 5 nas box, with added Twonky. No idea if that'll work with Sonos, but it does the job for me, streaming to PS3, phones, ipad etc while also providing nas shares for the PCs.....

If I didn't know better, I'd swear you made them up.

This is how it came out in my head....

"I have a 2GB [all fine up til there] moonbase charity gig rapper box with added pantomime character (or was it that robot from "Buck Rogers in the 21st century?)"

paulintheforest

I've got a Synology Diskstation Nas serving up all my music to Sonos. It works fine and if you look at the specs they throw all sorts of other functionality in that you may or may not be interested in, such as your own cloud, web server, mail server, torrent client, CCTV IP Camera monitoring.

And for backup I got a second one, they automatically sync with each other overnight to make sure it's all backed up. Next step is to move it to my Mum's for truly off site backups overnight.

PBo

nicklouse wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

PBo wrote:

I have LOADS of music on these little silver discs thingies....they work even when my broadband/wifi is down!!

Yeah, mine are stored on my, um, shelf. It's made of wood.

my streaming works if the internet does not. and I have lots of silver discs.

and a lot of larger discs with grooves in them. they are not all black.

Glad to see your arm is carbon....

essex-commuter

Just searching for a NAS and have seen a:

Buffalo Linkstation Live 1TB (1x 1TB) NAS Drive

Would this be OK, anyone have one and recommend it?


Oh and eBuyer.com, never bought from them before, any nasty stories? £70 - seems a good deal, or £105 for the 2TB

sketchley

The buffalo stuff is good, as above I have a terrastation live.

However couple of points,

1. The default dlna server which you need for sonos on the terrstation was a bit rubbish (pc cast iirc). I've subsequently installed twonky media server on the nas box which does the job better. However this involves some hacking..... but instructions where on the web. Twonky media for my nas cost £10.

2. The unit you are looking at is a single 1tb disk. Are you sure this is what you want? Do you have another 1tb drive to backup the collection too. Do you want the faff of having to ensure things as written to both? My box has 4 500gb drives configursed in raid 5 so if one disk fails I don't lose everything. ....

mudcow007

i have 4 terastations all to store a mixture of crap an have never had any issues with em, like most NAS boxes you can choose how you have the arrays set (mean you lose disk space but gain data redundancy)

could be worth getting an old terastation an buying a load of disks (500Gb/ 1Tb) to make it into a huuuge storage box

essex-commuter

Sketchley wrote:

The buffalo stuff is good, as above I have a terrastation live.

However couple of points,

1. The default dlna server which you need for sonos on the terrstation was a bit rubbish (pc cast iirc). I've subsequently installed twonky media server on the nas box which does the job better. However this involves some hacking..... but instructions where on the web. Twonky media for my nas cost £10.

2. The unit you are looking at is a single 1tb disk. Are you sure this is what you want? Do you have another 1tb drive to backup the collection too. Do you want the faff of having to ensure things as written to both? My box has 4 500gb drives configursed in raid 5 so if one disk fails I don't lose everything. ....

This is way over my head unfortunately! So in layman's terms..

Would I ever know that the DLNA server was a bit rubbish?
I do back-up to a seperate drive so wouldn't lose any data if the NAS went bresticles up. Are you saying that if I got the 2TB (2 x 1) it would duplicate the files on each drive?

Appreciate the info, thank you.

mudcow007

if you got a terastation with 2 x 500gb you can set them up as a mirror so what is one drive is copied to the other. so if a drive dies, wipe another in an data is copied again

or

you can stripe the drives together so instead of 500Gb storage you have 1000Gb but if one drive dies you lose the lot

hope that helps

clicky

jedster

The recommended approach is to have twin drives in the NAS with one mirroring the other. If you are disciplined about backing up then its not strictly necessary but for the cost of a duplicate driver it is well worth it I think. I use a NAS with 2 1gb drives. Every now and again I do back up to a USB hard drive too just in case some scrote breaks in and nicks my NAS.

All my CDs are in the loft now with the music ripped to FLAC (lossless) on the NAS drives feeding a Linn majik DS is the living room and a Naim UnitiQute in the kitchen.
I think streamers are great (sound better than similarly priced CD players, playlists, finding the music you want, etc) except when your network goes down. Mine is ethernet so shouldnt happen much but do need to ocasionally reboot the router which can be a tad irritating.

Ciar

I run a Sonos 5 as well, originally via my mac over wifi, but found that to be pony, switched that out, moved into running everything of a NAS, originally of a LAcie NAS now running everything on a 3TB Seagate NAS, i have all my music copied over to there, my Sonos connected to it, no issues with wifi or music not playing, had it over a year like this.

Also run two apple tv's jailbroken which connect to the nas for my movie/tv series collection, perfect streaming, i found the Sonos forum or their tech support the best option, as it's very easy to set up, the only slow process is copying everything over.

best part is if you have a usb port on your nas, your music on an external drive, plug that drive into the nas and copy or drag and drop, takes hours but it does work.

if you need any help just drop me a pm

essex-commuter

Ciar wrote:

I run a Sonos 5 as well, originally via my mac over wifi, but found that to be pony, switched that out, moved into running everything of a NAS, originally of a LAcie NAS now running everything on a 3TB Seagate NAS, i have all my music copied over to there, my Sonos connected to it, no issues with wifi or music not playing, had it over a year like this.

Also run two apple tv's jailbroken which connect to the nas for my movie/tv series collection, perfect streaming, i found the Sonos forum or their tech support the best option, as it's very easy to set up, the only slow process is copying everything over.

best part is if you have a usb port on your nas, your music on an external drive, plug that drive into the nas and copy or drag and drop, takes hours but it does work.

if you need any help just drop me a pm

Thank you. One of the reasons for wanting the music on a NAS is that the Sonos does dropout occassionally with my current set-up (music on wireless laptop). Sonos have just released a beta update that apparently helps address this but I still want the drive for storing other stuff so that we can access everything from any device.

I presume it's pretty simple to set-up in hardware terms, NAS connected to router as well as the Sonos Bridge?

Ciar

It's very easy, the sonos connects to the bridge and to the NAS the bridge is only for the Sonos nothing else, i have my sonos is the downstairs dining room, my router is and bridge as well as the nas drives in the loft, and i get perfect signal 3 floors away..

for movie streaming from the nas I do have a wifi extender as streaming movies is much more intense than music, can say the netgear wifi extender is brilliant.

any questions drop me a PM..

Ciar

Mr Essex-Commuter, I saw your PM but i can't actually reply to you or send you a PM, says i have not been active enough on the forum yet

in regards to your question, you plug the nas directly into your router, once you have done that and set it up, it will show up on your network, only accessible by any pc's or laptops on the same network, EG i have a mac and a pc as well as a ps3 they can all see my nas drives.

only thing you connect to your Sonos Bridge, is the sonos items nothing else.

essex-commuter

Cheers, I'm guessing it will all make sense when it arrives, was just trying to gen myself up so there were no surprises! Will be back in touch if it looks like I may have to consult a manual :-)

Ciar

It will all make sence once you set the NAS drive up and get it onto your network, one other tip if your music is on your mac/pc you will probably have to copy and paste it and try to drag it into the NAS drive once you can see it on your network, if your music is stored on an external hdd, you can plug that directly into the NAS and it will show up as an extension of your NAS drive, then you can again copy/paste of drag and drop it over, just remember this could take hours if you have tons of info, mine took just over 10 hours, and i had the external HDD plugged into my NAS.

essex-commuter

It arrived (well I had to pick it up in the end thanks to Yodel), it was a piece of cake to set up and it works perfectly!

One question, security. Can I assume that unless someone has my wi-fi pasword the files are reasonably secure? If someone did have my password (*my neighbour does) they would also need an IP address or something before they could see what was on the NAS?

* I was without wi-fi for a month when I moved (when you need it alot!) and my new neighbour let me use his. When his went down a few months ago I shared the favour, hence he has my password.

Dalton

essex-commuter wrote:

It arrived (well I had to pick it up in the end thanks to Yodel), it was a piece of cake to set up and it works perfectly!

One question, security. Can I assume that unless someone has my wi-fi pasword the files are reasonably secure? If someone did have my password (*my neighbour does) they would also need an IP address or something before they could see what was on the NAS?

* I was without wi-fi for a month when I moved (when you need it alot!) and my new neighbour let me use his. When his went down a few months ago I shared the favour, hence he has my password.

Assuming his is now up and running again, you could always just change the password?