Hi all. I have the luxury of having to think about the issue of storage space on my NAS. I currently have about 10+ TB of music in my library and right now I have for the storage a Melco with 6TB and a normal extension drive of 5TB. Now on the one hand I am running against the issue of getting towards the limits of storage capacity somewhere late this year or early next year. But I also have a quality difference between directly served from Melco and served from external drives.
Would be interested in the tips from people on how to deal with thisā¦, while sound quality is my main concern:
Is there a non Melco solution which challenges the Melco on sound quality with letās say towards 20TB of music ?
Schould I buy a 2nd Melco with the same capacity and accept that I have for instance a classical Melco and an others Melco and have two separate music servers in the background with the related issue of having to switch
Schould I just not care and get a small sized external disc which is of higher capacity then the 5TB
Should I get a N10 with a daisy chain of Melco drives connected to it ?
Or any other not thought of solutionā¦
Interested about your opinions and experiences - as there will be people with bigger libraries as wellā¦
There are numerous 6 or 12 bay Synology NAS units. There are enterprise level servers. I can think of no 20tb audiophile type units. I think maybe email Melco?
If I was in your situation, I would have already implemented a two-level approach towards storage.
You could keep on using the Melco with its 6TB for a first level āliveā collection of, say 3-4 TB with 2-3 TB of empty space on disk.
For this āliveā collection you do not do any maintenance, metadata editing or backup. It is just a small, live view of part of your whole collection.
You would then need a couple of 10-20 TB drives for long-term storage + backup of your whole collection. This is not a problem, drives are very cheap.
You would have to run two distinct servers, one indexing the small āliveā collection on the Melco and another one indexing your complete collection on the long-term storage. This, too, is not a problem.
You also need an effective way for copying albums from the long-term storage to the live collection (but not in the other direction) but this is very easy to do with a small script on your mobile phone, tablet or laptop.
Of course, you also need to erase albums from the āliveā collection from time to time. This, like copying files, is not a problem.
The āliveā collection would be completely unmanaged, you do all your maintenance, editing and backup work on the complete, long-term collection.
Edit: you could also have the long-term storage on cloud services if you do not want to take care of backup duties yourself.
WRT the Melco, does it have a dedicated āmusicā rj45?
Do you stream music from your NAS via the Melco, and do you find this a degredation when compared to direct from the Melco?
I am using the Melco as my NAS, and I am having a seperate standard extension disk connected to the Melco. Benefit is that I have everything in one libraryā¦ while I hear a sound advantage when the music comes directly from the Melco or comes from the secondary disk. And yes I have everything on FLAC and encode on the fly to WAV.
Thanks for your insight. However I love to have all the material at finger tips. I wouldnāt want to have an active selection and a separate total selection. I use this model for my mobile music with the Sony Walkman. But even there I then selected the music I like to have with me and even donāt work with a replacement disc as in general that satisfies my needs.
Perhaps you could contact Melco and try to convince them to implement a fix that allows users to fetch an album from a remore storage, temporarily save it on a small, dedicated partition of the local drive, replay it from there and delete it whenever the dedicated partition approaches 100% usage.
This is trivial to realize and would allow users with large collections to replay all their files with the best sound quality. There would be a slight delay when the system has to fetch a file that isnāt already stored on the local disk but that should not be a big deal in a decent LAN.
I am in fact a bit surprised that this is not the way the Melco servers work by default, I thought that the major selling argument for these devices was uniform sound quality, independently of the location an album is originally stored. This does not seem to be the case. Or perhaps you are just missing some setting?
Looked at a couple of manuals, appears they wonāt stream from a remote directory, only import, which I find VERY restrictive.
Looking at your original post I assumed you had a NAS and the Melco, I hadnāt appreciated you canāt address a remote dorectory.
I assume that you already compared a normal NAS to a Melco and found it unacceptable?
If YES, then you could look into devices such as this:
The problem with these boxes includes have a poor smps near your hifi. The question is whether when it is loaded up whether it can be configured to appear as a single drive to the Melco.
It doesnāt appear to mention RAID so it may be JBOD - but it will be a copy of what you have elsewhere.
As it is USB 3.0 it will enable fast copying from your NAS - if that is USB 3.0 as well.
If it works you could consider a LPSU to power it.
