cheapest/best NAS drive for itunes/sonos

[paultownsend]

a contradiction i know!

i have recently converted to sonos and im loving the experience.
my itunes library (90g's worth) is all stored on an external seagate 500mb drive. connected to my samsung nc10 notebook.

the issue is, every thime i disconnect the hard drive, then plug it back in, sonos cant find the files, and i have to re-attatch the routed files. takes ages!

so, i was looking at nas drives. but looking at amazon, they all have eccellent, and terrible reliability reviews. buffalo, seagate, wd. all of them. can i back up all files (and its only music files) on my old seagate just incase the new drive fails?

also, as said, theres nothing wrong with my seagate. its 4 years old and functioning perfectly. i was in maplin, and im sure a guy pointed out a device that connects my router and existing drive that permanently connects it to the network?

help is happily received

[Adam B]

you might want to move this to computers and gadgets

I am in the same boat and currently considering sonos +

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0047CNXJ2/ref=...

with 2 of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001UE8LRO/ref=...

[oola]

Get a Buffalo NAS Drive ... something like this [url]http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop/index.pl?prodID=2108257[url/]

Easy to set up and share files, perfect for Sonos.

[paultownsend]

http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop/index.pl?p...

anything wrong with this one? semms a good price

[hughjayteens]

I've got as Western Digital MyBook World Edition at home which was £90 for 1TB from PC World. Works perfectly for music and movies.

[fluffnik]

I have one of these LG N2B1s with a pair of 2TB disks. I back up irreplaceable data - photos mostly - in convenient 25GB BlueRay chunks...

I use custom firmware from here which adds SSH and NFS support which suits my unixy network, but the standard web interface has most things covered.

You can access the optical drive either from the web interface, which is fine for basic backups, or over iSCSI from a PC.

[pernod]

\\\\\If you are a non-geek - stop reading here.\\\\\

A 2nd hand older myworldbook can be had for very little and there's tutorials online to hack them and put a twonky media server on them.

As a plus, their USB port in the back will allow you to plug in the drive you currently have as well.

(i.e. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Wd-My-Book-World-Edition-500...

[fluffnik]

pernod said:

\\\\\If you are a non-geek - stop reading here.\\\\\

A 2nd hand older myworldbook can be had for very little and there's tutorials online to hack them and put a twonky media server on them.

I have a 1TB one, it is seriously underpowered and sloooooooooow. It even struggles with sustained disk I/O - rsync is painful...

The firmware I have on my LG has Twonky though I don't use it, you get DLNA iTunes and TimeMachine support out of the box.

pernod said:

As a plus, their USB port in the back will allow you to plug in the drive you currently have as well.

The LG has that too, x2. It also has a SD/MMC/xD slot and another USB port and will do automatic full or differential backups of media you plug into them too.

[fluffnik]

Some geeky lowdown on:

WD World Book

[teeth@folder0 ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) rev 5 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 99.73

LG LG N2B1

falafel:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARM926EJ-S rev 1 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 794.62

...and the 8x performance difference is noticeable.

/

[pernod]

fluffnik said:

...and the 8x performance difference is noticeable.

Yep, but the brief included 'cheapest'.

The cheapest LG on ebay uk is £130 vs the my world book at £30.

I can't say the speed issues have ever caused me any major issues on the myworldbook. Sure it's not the quickest, but it streams FLAC files perfectly and all my heavy duty photography backups are scheduled for overnight anyway.

[paultownsend]

you were correct. over my head!

my files are never going to exceed 250 gig. and il only be transfering music files. probs never movies or pictures.

i need it purely for my itunes/sonos and the files aren't even in lossless format. so cheaper and easier to use the better! which the above buffalo seems to be.

[pernod]

Yep, based on that I'd go for either a Buffalo or a new MyWorldBook (which doesn't require the hacking I mentioned above).

[fluffnik]

pernod said:

Yep, but the brief included 'cheapest'.

The cheapest LG on ebay uk is £130 vs the my world book at £30.

A good point well made.

Cheap and inexpensive are of course different things...

[ehonda]

I've got a couple of buffalo NAS's for my sonos.
Ocassionally lose them from the PC, but never from the sonos. Never had any issues with them and they're pretty simple to set up.

[paultownsend]

thank you ehonda.

do you know if the nas can connect directly to the sonos zonebridge via ethernet? my bt homehub had ran out of ports

Edited by paultownsend on Friday 25th February 11:21

[oola]

paultownsend said:

thank you ehonda.

do you know if the nad can connect directly to the sonos zonebridge via ethernet? my bt homehub had ran out of ports

Everything needs to connect through router. Just get a 4/8 or 16 port switch and use that to connect your devices to.

[paultownsend]

how easy is a nas to set up. is it as simpke as plug into the router, my computer sees it on the network, and i set the route path through sonos?

60gig of music seems alot of info to move from my current hard drive in one go. can i move the files hard wired from usb, or does it all have to be done over the network?