Have a uniti Atom, want to back up my flac files onto a USB drive, will the Atom manage a 500gb drive or could i use a 1tb?
There is no absolute limit on the drive size you can use. You may find that it will take a while to scan a large drive with a lot of music on it.
View it in the Server input under Local Music. In the USB input you will just get a long list with no metadata.
I’ve got a 1TB drive. Works absolutely fine.
Swapped to SSD quite a few years ago, and the Atom seemed to work better with SSD than HDD (had a few issues with plays lists using HDD).
I’ve got a 1Tb on my Star
From the Atom Specs on the Naim Website
2 x USB Type A Socket (front and rear)
External portable SSD – max. 1TB
USB sticks – max. 128 GB.
Many devices quote a maximum supported drive size. I’ve yet to come across a limit that couldn’t be exceeded. My Atom, for example, is fine with a 256GB memory stick and a 2TB hard drive.
2 Likes
This sounds good but better have a high performance drive on an optimized file system to get the devices indexing fast enough!
When I had a 2tb external hard drive plugged into my Naim uniti Atom Headphone, edition it would reboot the Atom I wasn’t using the server mode just the USB plugged into it. why would it do that
Ive just triedto use a crucial ssd drive 1tb and no music folders showing even though approx 250gb music on it. Its formatted nfts, should it have been fat32?
NTFS should be fine according to Naim.
Are you looking in the USB input, or in the Server input/Local Music? The latter should show a tag view, not folders, assuming the files have the appropriate metadata.
ChrisSU
Im looking in server input/local music and nothing, yet if I plug a small 126gb usb stick in it reads it. Just plugged crucial inot tablet and all folders seen in files…mmmmm.
My query is peripherally related to this topic:
Background: I have had a Uniti Atom for 4 weeks. Before that I have had ~12 years experience listening to my digitalised music with several Cocktail Audios (X10, X12, X14, X40, N25) and Brennans (JB7, B2). My overwhelmingly major music source is a collection on a SSD and/ or USB sticks. Streaming services are not for me. My music collection comprises only 130Gb, but ~1600 folders in ~1000 files. So this is, of course, over the limit which Naim advises would not cause indexing problems. And yes, I was intrigued to see that the Atom in Server mode could indeed not cope indexing my collection, with which I had never had any problem in all my Cocktail Audios and Brennans. I received advice - very promptly - from the very knowledgeable support person at Naim. The suggestion was to divide my collection up into 2 or three parts - which I did, using a series of SSDs (1TB) and/ or sticks (128Gb). Indeed, with the USB-connected stick or SSD containing half of my collection indexing seems no problem for the Atom. The downside is however, as soon as I change my collection from stick one with the first half of my collection to stick 2 with the second, all “favorites” and “playlists” need renewing and are not rescuable even after going back to stick 1. On further discussion with the Naim support person, the suggestion was made that I introduce a NAS into my system. Mindful of the small size of my collection (130Gb) I had never considered this. Reading in some accompanying forum contributions that using a NAS with wireless connection (which would be the case in my place) can be fraught with problems. So, inpired by the contribution by yet another forum user, I hooked up my Brennan B2 harboring my total music DB to the Atom via toslink, and now I can access my total collection, although I use the Atom only as an amplifier for my Brennan. Considering the considerable investment made getting the Atom, I am a trifle disappointed in the problems which it has with indexing medium size music collections.
At last now my query: Has anybody out there any suggestion how I could circumvent NAS and yet use my total collection in the Atom set up (server mode) without having to use either multiple sticks or using it as the amp for my Brennan?
1 Like
Why are so against a NAS?
It will serve your purpose beautifully and is really easy to set up. Not too costly either.
Hi Neilb1906
Thank you! I am not against fitting a NAS per se, but it would entail inevitably a wireless connection, and from some insightful Naim forum contribution somewhere else I deduce that this is very often not working properly… Hence my hesitancy.
If your home network functions properly you should be fine running the Atom on WiFi. The NAS can be wired, and stuck in a cupboard out of the way somewhere, as it doesn’t need to be physically close to the Atom, and probably won’t have WiFi anyway.
What is the restriction for indexing, can you reorganise the files? Ultimately it’s the metadata that is used, so the actual placement of the files themselves should be irrelevant.
That is an interesting suggestion, robert_h. Thank you. I meant of course: “…~1000 folders (artists) with ~1600 files (albums)”…
Two provisos, though: I have the suspicion that - the way the Naim recommendations pertaining to file/folder number etc are phrased - even only the 1600 files without any folders would incapacitate or overwhelm the Naim indexing system. Also, I do not know how to extract efficiently all the files (albums) from the folders (artist names) without going laboriously from one musician folder to the next, and that ~1000 times… I know MP3Tag may offer such a possibility, but I cant get my head around all that MP3Tag jargon. Any suggestion here?
A UPnP server (either the one built into the Atom or one running on a NAS or computer on your home network) ignores your folder system completely. It reads metadata (aka tags) instead to identify the name of the track, album, artist, genre etc.
So there is no need to keep your music files ordered into neat folders. The server will allow you to browse and play your albums even if there is no folder structure at all, or a chaotic one.
True, but there are certainly advantages to keeping a file system in order. An example within the Naim eco-system. Suppose I want to take my portable drive and attach it to my Muso. Now (unless I’m missing something) I don’t have access to a server. I only have access to the file system. If the file system is disorganized I’m out of luck.
By the way, I use JRiver to organize my music library (and as my server). JRiver’s move/copy/rename feature allows the use of Expression Language, whereby I can move files in large groups. In my setup the target is G:\music\[genre]\[album artist]\[album], where the bracketed terms are placeholders for the relevant metadata. (After that, for albums where the track name does not begin with the track number, I enter =PadNumber([Track #],3) [Filename (name)] for the filename so that the track order remains the same. Again this can be done to multiple tracks at a time.)
Thanks to the folks on the JRiver forum for helping me figure out the latter expression.
1 Like
Can you point me to the source for those figures?