Forgive me if this has been covered previously. I have searched and found nothing.
My UnitiServe is getting quite old now and I would like to know if it is possible to upgrade the internal HD to an SSD.
I have access to a SATA cloning device, so my thoughts are to take the HD out and do a block level clone of the HD to a new SSD, then popping the SSD in.
Would this work? Is there a procedure for changing the UnitiServe HD to an SSD?? Has anyone done this???
Any help appreciated.
Thanks,
Tom
Nope it wont work, or at least it wont work medium to long term. In all honesty look at this end of the forum, Unitiserve, HDX etc are all going wrong more reguarly, they are now obsolete spending money on them is ill advised and I have tried exactly what you want to do. It works for about 2 months then goes belly up, I tried it three times lol (on an NS02)
Beyond that what you propose is fine, i.e. cloning it etc will appear to work and certainly on the NS02 it seemed to work fine.
My guess is the software is for a rust spinner converting to SSD perhaps needs slightly different software or bios or what ever and due to the ancient nature of it (Imbedded XP!) there may be no TRIM for the ssd so it soon goes belly up.
Or perhaps I was just unlucky.
Hi Tom, there is no officially supported route to changing the drive to SSD so if you attempt this you are on your own, with no guarantee of success. Unless you are very confident in what you are doing I would leave well alone. Just make sure the US backup is working properly so that if it dies you can keep access to your music collection.
Naim don’t support doing this. I recall that the US service agent does do it though, presumably successfully.
So notwithstanding that I agree with and respect what @garyi is saying from his own experience, if you want to try doing it, then it won’t do any harm, especially as a Unitiserve has little financial value these days even if it’s working properly.
But do make sure you have a good backup before you start.
Thanks all of you. The main reason for doing this is to pre-empt and avoid a HD failure, and therefore prolong the life of my UnitiServe.
With that in mind, would it be better to swap out the old HD for a new HD? I don’t need an SSD in the UnitiServe. This would, presumably, avoid Gary’s theory of different firmware for HDs and SSDs.
If so, is there a HD spec to adhere to?
Cheers,
Tom
You hard drive may or may not continue working for years. I would just replace it when it dies and restore from backup, either onto a replacement drive or a replacement device.
Thing is this is not straight forward to do at home then you have to bung naim like 500 quid which is insane. Convert any files to Flac and put them safe, enjoy it till it dies then move on. Asides from the naim badge and some tweaking its a micro ATX in a box.
You have to put the operating system on the HD too and Naim won’t supply the image. So it’s not a DIY job to change the HD like it is in a PC.
Agree with all the replies, it just doesn’t make sense to try and extend the life of a US, especially with a DIY solution that is completely unsupported by anyone.
Moreover, are you absolutely certain that your US backups a good, particularly if you have to try and restore the content to a non US device in the absence of a suitable s/h replacement?
Why not consider an alternative device such as a NAS or Innuos Zen Mini, although the US library migration remains an issue…… But should be easier whilst your US is still ‘alive’.
Perhaps others, more experienced in this dark art, could advise….?
KR, J
Or Gut the US, and put inside a Raspberry Pie with an SDD and you have yourself a streamer
As long as the CD rips are in FLAC it’s a simple drag and drop to copy files from the US to another storage device.
Zen Mini would almost certainly be my choice of replacement if a regular NAS doesn’t appeal.
Thats what I did, well with a micro ATX, its a roon endpoint now
Thanks everyone. All CD rips are in WAV and the backup is good and on a Drobo 5N NAS. Maybe I can just use that as the source if and when the US fails in the future?
Tom
You can if you run a UPnP server and give that access to the backup folder.
You need to convert the WAVs to FLAC on the US before you part with it in order for this to work.
Thanks Chris. How do I convert the WAVs to FLACs on the US?
The US manual says music files stored onto a NAS can be in lots of formats including WAV. Why do you say they need to be FLAC?
Thanks,
Tom
The main reason will be because all the metadata for a WAV file is kept separate to the file, so if you move a wav file to a different location, all the Artists/Album details are lost. FLAC files however contain the metadata within them, so the Artists/Album details stay with them wherever they go. Your NAS uPnP server will then be able to read all that music data
Thanks GadgetMan.
Can anyone explain the procedure to convert WAV to FLAC on the US,please?
Thanks,
Tom
I genuinely cannot remember somewhere in dtc
However when you do I suggest doing it ib batches by artist letter or what ever and don’t use it whilst it’s doing it or it pauses.
Depending on the library it could take a couple of days but worth the effort.
Non-Naim servers almost invariably cannot see the metadata of a Naim rip due to the way in which it’s stored. This is only a problem with WAV. Converting to FLAC is simple, but will take a while with a large library. For that reason I would suggest converting in batches rather than all in one go - maybe one genre at a time.
As a Mac user I can tell you how to do it in N-Serve - not sure how you do it in the Windows DTC but I dare say it’s something similar:
Control-click on any category from the list on the L side of the page and select Encode to > FLAC from the dropdown list.
Awesome, thanks Chris. I am on Mac too.
Tom
