I’m considering buying a one bay NAS to use as a music server - don’t worry as I intend to back up to USB hard drives rather than rely upon RAID - to replace an old QNAP NAS which has mechanical drives and is quite noisy.
One factor that is important to me, is that it’s silent in use as I will have to use it in my living room. I’ve found a QNAP TS-128a for £120 and a Kingston SSD 1.92GB (UV500b 2.5 sata) for around £300.
Can any one tell me how easy an SSD is to fit into a NAS enclosure, and is it then simply a case of copying my existing music file library (all saved as FLAC files) to the NAS, ‘enabling’ a UPNP such as Twonky and playing?
I hope that makes sense, and any opinion would be greatly appreciated.
Nigel,
I have a TS-128-A which I use as a file server, not media server, however it will do that simply enough.
Mounting a disk in the TS-128-A is a matter of click fitting two runners to the 3.5inch disk that QNAP expect you to use. As SSDs tend to be 2.5 inch disk size you’ll need a 2.5->3.5 adapter, but you need to make sure the mounting holes align with those on a 3.5 inch disk. My experience is that many/most don’t. You then just push the disk home and put the lid back on - no tools required.
(You might also need a 2.5 - 3.5 inch SATA converter - it’s so long since I did this I can’t remember)
As you say, you then copy your files to a share on the device, which you’ll need to create, and install a server that will serve the media from that share. I use Asset - I’m not a fan of Twonky. It’s worth trying the free version of Asset, it may do all you want (the price for the full version isn’t that high if you want the fully featured version).
I’ve looked at the QNAP website in the meantime and there’s a compatibility tool which shows what upgrades can be done. This doesn’t show any SSDs that work with this model, so may need to do a bit more research.
I fitted a Seagate Ironwolf 2TB disk in mine - never heard a noise from it so you may not need SSD for quiet operation. WD Red makes very little noise but you can hear its heads shuffling round.
There is a fan in the TS-128-A which you might hear if you’re close enough, but that would be verry close indeed.