Help needed please, im a bit of a technonumpty where anything more indepth than setting up a new wireless connection is involved.

Recently made the decision to buy a new stereo and im going to go with a sonos multi room system, mainly to use with spotify.

But i also want it to be able to play all my music from a hard drive which after a bit of research is easy with a NAS drive attached to my roouter.

So far so good, Now what the hell is a NAS Drive, is it a hard drivve storage device that can send files through my home wifi. And if so please tell me its easy to set up because i am a bit of a nugget when it comes to things like this.

Ta 😀

And if so please tell me its easy to set up because i am a bit of a nugget when it comes to things like this.

well , you can do it ,i m sure !

NAS = Network Attached Storage = a hard drive enclosure with a network connection.

You can buy them with or without disks already fitted. Without I would recommend QNAP – mine has been very good. I guess if you want to play your music and ( I would hope ) backup your PC then it would be a good idea to get something a bit less powerful/easier to use.

Hopefully someone will be along in a while to suggest a nice, easy to use box.

One thing – buy sooner rather than later, due to flooding the Thailand, hard drive prices are set to increase substantially for the next year.

One thing – buy sooner rather than later, due to flooding the Thailand, hard drive prices are set to increase substantially for the next year.

They already have, prices have trebled in most cases..

I have one of these

netgear

Very relaible, I havent rebooted it in over 2 years. Other brands are available such as qnap, iomega etc etc. Ebuyer sometimes have good deals.

You can buy one pre-populated with drives, or unpopulated which may save you a few pounds but if you ain’t too hot with the computaz probably easier to buy with the drives already in.

One feature to look for is mirroring or RAID1 (the same thing) which means one drive is a copy of another so if one fails it keeps on trucking with no data-loss, although you do then only have half the capacity (e.g. you buy one with 2x1TB drives you only get 1TB for your files as the other drive is a copy, rather than 2TB space). But i’d say it was worth it.

Also depending on how much data you have how many drives (bays) it can take can be a factor, but generally for home use one that takes 2 drives should be ok….

Dave

I have one of these HP Microservers and it works flawlessly, uses very little power and because it’s a server I can do much more with it. You could put this on it and then you could also put this on it so you can access your tunes (or documents, etc) on your smartphone of choice (except windows mobile 6.x, but that’s archaic junk anyway)

It’s a bit of a learning curve if you don’t do anything like this normally, but if you can read and have a little patience then you’ll be up and running in a weekend at the very most and have an extremely capable server.

SONOS is great by the way.

You’ll need a few hard disks, may I suggest the Western Digital Green drives, they’re nice and low power, you’ll need to mirror them (easily configurable in freenas) so that should one disk go down you have the other. I’d also suggest sticking in two other drives and then you can store any work documents or whatever on that (and repeat the mirroring process) so you have access to your music and work docs wherever.

As you use Freenas with your server, you could then buy some storage somewhere and have your entire music collection available in the cloud, this gives you complete failover so should your server be stolen/faulty/whatever you don’t loose the many hours you spent either ripping your cd collection (again pretty much automated using linux) or downloaded.

Best of luck,
JT

oh, if you can wait, it would be much better. Just checked out ebuyer’s price for 2tb disks, £140 each. OUCH, they were approx £50 last time I looked!!!

Have exactly the same setup – Sonos playing tunes from Spotify and my ReadyNas Duo. Was easy to set up, Sonos sees the NAS with no problems, plays flac files.

ReadyNas Duo also streams 1080p mkv files to my telly. Really is a great way of storing all your multimedia content centrally, ready to deliver on demand.

FWIW I bought the ReadyNas Duo around this time last year when Netgear were running a promo – free 2nd 2TB disk when you buy ReadyNas unit with a 2TB disk. Worth keeping an eye out to see if they’re doing anything similar again.

I’ve just started using vortexbox to rip CDs into FLAC format. Used an old laptop to load vortexbox onto and just pop in a CD and it rips, downloads track info, album art then ejects the CD when done. You can monitor progress through a web browser an another device.

Nice one, cheers guys, i reckon ill hold on till prices drop, and thanks for the help 😀

im also using a microserver and freenas with serviio and subsonic for my multimedia software and a sony dlna player for the tv/amp

hdd very expensive at the moment, its insane