Need help moving from CDP to Mac Mini music server

So I read up on the Buffalo and Yellow Machine 1TB NASs and I'm not sure this is actually the way to go, as both have problems (either interface, noise, or dependability problems). As I'm not going to use this setup for anything besides music, it doesn't need to be on all the time, so I'm thinking an external Firewire drive would be acceptible (if anyone thinks I'm wrong, chime in).

I'm looking at the following two solutions, so any tech savy folks feel free to chime in. I'd be getting two of each and using one to back up the other:

500GB Mercury Elite Pro 7200RPM
500GB NewerTech miniStack v2 7200RPM

They're both around$420, and as far as I can tell are made by the same company (see http://eshop.macsales.com/ ). The form factor of the NewerTech matches the mini and is stackable, and has heatsinks, but I wonder which is quiter. The Mercury elite has Firewire 800, but that's not a make or break for me since the mini only supports 400. What to do?

Also, haven't heard from anyone about using the toslink out on the new intel mac mini direct into a DAC vs. using USB or AE to toslink. Anyone? Bueler?

Thanks,

Matt

Matt,

I can't vouch for the Yellow Machine, but I do own a terastation. It is very quiet. Besides, one benefit of a NAS is that it can be put anywhere you can run ethernet (i.e., a closet somewhere). It also means it can be accessed by any computer on the ethernet network. Mine is shared by a computer in my study, a computer attached to my main rig, a slim device in my bedroom, a slim device in my pool room, and an audiotron in my garage.

Ethernet v. firewire isn't an issue. Even slow ethernet is 10 mbps, which is a lot faster than your AE or your firewire.

And, as far as backups, RAID 5 isn't a perfect solution, but it is a pretty good compromise in my mind. The theory of RAID 5--this is kinda simplified--is that it is made up of four drives, say A, B, C and D. If you are writing data, it writes Block 1 on A, Block 2 on B, Block 3 on C, and Block 1 + Block 2 + Block 3 on D. If Drive A goes bad, all that data can be recovered by subtracting Block 2 and Block 3 from Drive D. In other words, for any single drive failure, it is completely redundant. You are screwed with a two drive failure. But, if you are just backing up drive A to drive B, you are screwed with a two drive failure anyway.

I did use my terastation with both Win XP computers and a Mac Mini, so there shouldn't be any interface issues.

As far as the cute drives made to look like the Mac Mini, I wonder about heatpipe efficiency and longevity. Like I said, I've had major problems with drives blowing up and losing data. I haven't researched heat pipe systems extensively, but wonder about whether the implementation is as efficient in cooling as fan based systems. The more heat, the shorter the drive life.

My terastation has been on 24/7 for 9 months and never hiccupped. The Lacie drives and Maxstor drives I tried never lasted more than about 3 months...

Mimberman
I haven't experienced any interference from either my cordless phone or microwave. I don't talk on the phone a lot and when I do I usually turn down the sound if music is playing.

This morning I played some Satie through the system so that it would be easy to hear if anything was going on, called my office voice mail on the cordless phone and walked all around the system for a minute or so while I talked on the phone. It didn't create any interference that I could hear.

Same thing with the microwave. I turned it on for a couple of minutes while the music was playing and couldn't detect anything. It's only about 20 feet from my system, in the next room with an open doorway between.

Not saying there couldn't be inteference but I've never detected any in my setup.

I bought a glass optical cable, as well, from Captnstarstripe here on audiogon. It's a very nice cable for about the same price as a plastic one.

I'll respond to either this thread or one of the ones I started a few months back once I've adequate time to evaluate the AE and the quality running it wireless. As for my audio-server, right now we're in beta mode if you will. I've ripped all my Pearl Jam CD's to my PC upstairs and share it via itunes. I access it through my wireless laptop downstairs where my stereo is and point the laptop to the AE . I haven't had one audio hiccup due to interference. If you think about the path the music has to travel to go from my laptop to the stereo that's pretty impressive on a 54mb/sec wireless setup. Edesilva explained the RAID 5 setup well enough, but let me just add one or two things in case you are still a bit confused. Using the Terra station as an example. If you have .7 TB usable, in his exmple using 4 disks, it's probably made up of 4x300GB drives. Again this is just a guess as there are many different RAID5 schemes used by the vendors, but the point is you don't make use of all of the space on all of the drives, that's by design. A simplistic way to think about it is take the total number of drives you have and subtract one. The remaining total is roughly what you will have usable under R5. Also, you mentioned using two drives and only filling up half of it. The way it works is you have a mirrored pair. It's called RAID 1 (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). You have the full capacity of one drive, and the second drive is not directly accessable, the OS "mirrors" the data on the first to the second so if it dies, with a bit of work you can access everything by activating the second drive.

I understand the advantages of RAID technology for redundancy but I'm not sure it's necessarily the best solution in this use, at least for most people. The advantage is that you're constantly backing up your data so that there's no chance you'll lose any of the work you've done in the interim between backups, which is a good thing, but there are disadvantages to having the redundant data housed in the same box as your primary data.

I think the way most people will set up a hard drive-based system is to spend a lot of time initially ripping a big pile of CD's, then ripping new stuff occasionally as it's bought. What you're interested in protecting is that big initial investment of time and it might make more sense to have two separate external drives, one as the primary and one that is brought out once a week or once a month to take the new stuff.

If you're really interested in protecting that investment, you're better off having the second drive in a different physical location and offline so that some kind of accident, a power surge or knocking the enclosure off a desktop doesn't take out everything. If you've ripped 10 CD's since the last time you took your backup drive out of the closet and done a backup, it's not a big deal since it takes less than five minutes to rip most discs.

RAID is cool but it's a little more complicated and expensive. Like many of you, I'm entertained by complicated solutions but I think in this case simpler might be better.