[woodsyi]

Hirez files add up quickly and you really need more than just a disk drive to store your music to play through your PC. 

What format RAID are you using:  0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60 or non (JBOD)?  What would be the best for music playback?

[ted_b]

Rim,
I am using Synology products and use their Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) setup.  It is one disc fault tolerant.

http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index.php/What_is_Synology_Hybrid_RAID%3F

[zybar]

Rim,
I am using Synology products and use their Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) setup.  It is one disc fault tolerant.

http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index.php/What_is_Synology_Hybrid_RAID%3F

+1 on the Synology Setup.

I have over 30TB's of storage and it works very well (only had one problem in a few years of use).

George

[woodsyi]

It looks like y'all have Synology NAS.  Jtwrace has the same thing.  Unfortunately I didn't get the memo and committed to a Thecus unit.  It has  a quad core Intel® Xeon® E3-1225 3.1GHz Processor which I though would be better then the dual core atom processor on my former NAS.  Actually, I was piggy backing on a NAS I got my wife for her home based consultant business.  I am at the point of eating up all her space.  So I went and got one for me and she can have her storage back.

I think I am going to go 50.  I get RAID 5 parity and RAID 0 striping.  Smaller 5 arrays mean quicker rebuild on failed drive.   Striping means faster read then standard RAID 5 which is already fast.  It's probably an overkill for audio but I won't have to worry about file transfer speed.  Whatever lagging issue will be due to something else.  Slow write speed of 5 is supposed to get better with 50 too. 

[jpm]

Another +1 on Synology. Now on my third box in 5 years, all of which have handled FLAC and MP3 with great ease.

The ability to get stable 1080p video streaming was the reason for my first upgrade - never any hint off an issue with audio and this was from a box running a marvel processor and 256 MB of RAM. My subsequent upgrade last year was to add extra drive bays and replace my ageing 2TB drives with 4TB ones.

After a close call caused by a UPS failure, I went to RAID6 and have just added an external 6TB drive to back up content that changes infrequently.  While rebuilds do take a long time, the systems remain fully useable and doesn't appear to take a performance hit. A full reload from backup is going to be a time consuming exercise no matter what RAID topology you choose.

I'd sugggest exploring the use of SSD cache to improve performance before going down the very expensive RAID 50 or 60 paths.

Even if someone's on a budget, something like the DS213j or DS214 with a pair of same size drives would do very nicely - just use the second drive as the daily backup target for the first and you have a nice self contained package that will handle just about anything 90% of the population could reasonably need for audio.