Storage Device Recommendations

Hello,
I saw something cool in my Hifi store https://holmaudio.com/ It is the Sony server HAp-Z1es. This can rip your CDs and store them in one place. It also has DSD capabilities and balanced output. The app works awesome plus other devices like streamers can access the music from this Sony player. Also if you get an external hard drive you can go crazy with the amount. Another product is the BlueSound Vault. It is a streamer and cd ripper. The Sony is a higher grade of sound and storage. So here is a really good low cost $899 and mid cost option $1999. There are higher end ones but they are out of my budget fit now. https://holmaudio.com/

Taxing a hard drive with music file access? Not a chance. Music access performs very little stress to a hard drive. When I was working in the IT sector for over 40 years, I dealt with very large databases running on million dollar storage systems and the last 10 years worked for companies that sold hard drives and solid state storage products. Most of us use personal hard drives and ssd/nvme products, not the enterprise rated products and there are big differences in quality and speed. If you want redundancy, I’ve used all the different RAID configurations, and for music, I would use a hardware RAID 5 configuration in either a 3 disk configuration, which results in faster reads but slower writes. In music and video, it’s a write once and read many times environment, perfect for RAID 5. Also, I would never use personal grade solid state storage for caching or for backups. Caching will wear out a personal grade SSD much faster because of the lack of enough overprovisioning that an enterprise SSD provides and the lack of TRIM on certain OS’s.
For my Roon database, I use a standalone 5TB drive, no RAID/no redundancy, and back it up daily to a 8TB disk. I also have another 8TB backup disk stored in a safe that every couple of months, I take my current backup disk and store it in the safe and then reuse the backup drive from the safe as my current backup. I’ve had to restore my mac a couple of times in the last 20/30 years and the backups have always worked flawlessly to restore the Mac.
I also don’t use the portable usb powered disks, I use the bigger vented external powered disks. As for SSD for music, more quiet, but also overkill. I use an SSD/nvme device for my boot drive mainly to run the Roon index structure on it for faster access, but all the TBs of music files are on an external hard drive.

Hello,
I made a mistake above. The BlueSound Vault is $1299 which rips your CDs. The Powernode 2i is $899? Which does not rip CDs, but has a built in amplifier. Both are available at: https://holmaudio.com/

Whichever way you go, if you have the choice of selecting and purchasing drives avoid Seagate unless you get the enterprise Exos, some say Ironwolfs are good but I personally won't use them, if you go WD get Red Plus (no Reds), and you cannot go wrong with HGST the best drives IMO, with helium filled He, owned by WD today.
If you go DAS is fine just be aware that when you implement RAID, hardware raid that is you are binded to the controller, if the controller dies and you cannot get an exact replacement you won't be able to read the content.

Someone suggested qnap, is a good alternative but I had my troubles with it and also with synology.

The users who suggested backups are right on track, you could use just two separate enclosures with 2 drives one active and one for backups, very simple but should work.

Unless you have a very very resilient solution with RAID 6 or something similar like Zfs filesystems RaidZ2 and such which you won't most likely don't get cheap consumer grade drives and try to stick with the ones listed above, if you are bothered by noises of the drives (don't know how close your drives are to your listening room) let me know and I will recommend something specifically to keep noise down, HGST are silent operating but tend to be "clickety" on acces, the reds plus are fine.