I’ve used Synology media server a bit and found it to be perfectly reliable. Asset is a more versatile server which many prefer, but we all have our own way of browsing music and you may or may not find its extra features useful.
I may have to go this way then thanks. I think I’ll just get a NAS and Asset for my CD collection.
These is one on ancertain auction site for around £50 at the moment, it’s a QNAP TS-220 2 Bay NAS (RAID) with 2 x 2TB WD20EFRX data drives.
Do you think this would suffice?
Thanks
I’m not qualified, not literally of course, to advise. My Qnap is a TS253A. The drives need to be WD Red, which are designed for use in a NAS.
If you load a upnp server and a few music files onto your PC, it’s a good way of learning how the process works. And it shouldn’t cost you any money.
I’ve been streaming from a nas for 10 years, streaming from Tidal and Quboz for a couple of years. I hardly ever stream from the nas now, Qoboz has most of the music on my Nas and so, so much more.
I wouldn’t advise anybody to rip/stream CD’s from a NAS, unless they have very diverse musical tastes that aren’t available on Tidal/Quboz.
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You don’t need to use WD Red Drives.
For domestic use, any 5400 rpm drive will do. I use seagate.
The thing is, these days I don’t get much time to listen, maybe an hour a week but when I do listen I want it to be good so paying a sub seems a waste of money. Its a shame Tidal etc don’t do a lite sub for a couple of quid a month, maybe ten hours limit.
Cheers
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If you’ve only got one hour a week available, I’d be inclined to stick with what you’ve got. Otherwise that hour is going to be spent setting up and putting music on your NAS rather than the much more important business of listening to music. Just a thought.
Roger
Yeah I know what you mean, my hobby is learning guitar which is a never ending journey.
During the months March to October I’m at my caravan in Pembrokeshire Friday to Sunday and it’s those weeks that I don’t get much time to listen, but what I was going to do is wait until the winter comes and use a couple of weekends to rip the CDs and set up the NAS or possibly take half hour out of my guitar practise per night in the summer months to rip a few CDs per evening.
Basically, my free time is 7pm to 8:30pm most evenings and Saturday afternoons & Sunday mornings during November to March.
I know you don’t need to know that but I thought I’d explain.
Cheers
Indeed!
However, it is probably best to use hard drives that are optimized for use in NAS devices. WD Reds (I use WD Red Pro drives in my Synology NASs) are optimized for use in NAS devices, but there are equivalent specific Seagate drives that have also been optimized for use in NAS devices.
Drives that have been optimized for NAS devices tend to run at 5400 rpm rather than the 7200 rpm at which most conventional desktop based drives run.
EDIT: I got it wrong when I posted that I use WD Red Pros. I don’t!. The drives I use are WD Red Plus which are less expensive but use similar CMR technology, unlike the standard WD Reds which use SMR.
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Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro. The latter run at 7200, I believe.
Roger
I am not sure what you mean by flexibility. Do you mean it plays more file types? Does additional functionality appear in the Naim App with a different server? Sorry if these questions are silly.
The Ironwolf pro and the WD Red Pro are for use in medium size businesses. These aren’t needed if you’re using a nas for streaming music and backing up data.
The WD Reds are optimised by increasing the time, before the read/write heads are parked. This could allow files to be accessed quicker and increase the life of the drive due to the fact that every time the heads are parked, wear occurs.
These two factors are irrelevant when the drive is used in a domestic environment, primarily to stream music.
Regarding optimised hard drives. Yesterday I replaced a 120gb Kingston SSD (six years old) with a 500gb WD Blue SSD in my PC. The read/write speed of the WD Blue is slower than the Kingston by a significant amount. 
I have an old WD MyCloud, for which WD is terminating support in April because my model has been hacked and WD can’t update it. Yours is probably newer, but from what I read a while back, it requires access to the WD website. Spend some time looking into this, and any steps needed to maintain security. Also my MyCloud came with Twonky but does not support Asset.
Right now I’ve triple checked to confirm the MyCloud is LAN only and is inaccessible from the web. For the moment, I’m running it in tandem with my JRiver server on a local computer. They access different copies of my music library (which also provides for my backup).
I agree that the significantly more expensive WD Red Pro is not required for typical domestic set-ups.
However, for anyone going down the NAS/WD Red route, I would recommend going for WD Red Plus rather than the WD Red. The ‘Red Plus’ is not much (if any) more expensive than the standard ‘Red’, and is a CMR drive rather than the SMR standard ‘Red’. Google or Youtube to check the significant advantages of CMR over SMR.
With Asset you have the ability to customise the ‘browse tree’ which allows you to set how you see and choose your music within the Naim app. You can choose how ‘the’ is treated, so that The Smiths appear under S rather than T for example. You can set it to transcode flac to WAV. These things may or may not be important to you, of course.
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