Mini-Mac Server as an NAS

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You really don't need a reference, it is built into the Apple operating system.

Hook up the drives and open disk utilities. Select one of the drives and then select Raid. Name it, use the default format, and select concatenated. Drag all of the drives you want into the box and select create. When it is done you will have what appears to the computer as one disk drive that is the sum of all the drives you included.

You'll use a program running on the Mac to rip. In the preferences for whatever program you choose you can tell it to store the files directly on your array.

go poke around at these sites to learn more

http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/

http://www.usbdacs.com/

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07-30-11: Richardfinegold
What I'm wondering is if the NAS software allows the pc to rip and store on the NAS without having to store it one the pc?

The ripping program should allow the target drive to be selected from among all drives that can be seen by the operating system, including a NAS drive.

07-30-11: Larry_s
And also be careful that there are new disks that are being sold now that use 4K physical sector sizes and use software in the drive to do 512 byte sector emulation for the O/S. Stay away from them. And I believe there are some type of "hybrid" drives out that have 4K sectors and somewhat large solid state caches to help overcome the performance degradation of 512 byte emulation when using physical 4K sectors. Stay away from them also.

These are what are often referred to as "Advanced Format" drives, which are becoming increasingly prevalent among large capacity drives. The issue is that if partitions aren't aligned with the 4K sector boundaries, speed may be compromised. However,

1)Mac os's from Tiger onward, as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7 under most circumstances (i.e., if a cloning utility is not used), will correctly align the partitions when the drive is formatted, without doing anything special.

2)Western Digital provides an alignment utility for use with Windows XP and other older os's (see the links below).

3)In a NAS or other external drive application, the speed compromise that would result from misalignment is likely to be nil, because read and write speeds will be limited by the network interface (unless it is a wired gigabit ethernet connection), as well as by the cd drive during ripping, and by the audio data rate during playback, not by the hard drives in the NAS.

See the following for additional information:

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/WhitePapers/ENG/2579-771430.pdf

http://www.wdc.com/global/products/features/?id=7&language=1

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5655

I'll add that I recently installed an external (USB) Western Digital advanced format drive on a Windows XP system, without using the alignment utility, and its speed as measured with HD Tune was as good as I would expect from any USB-connected drive.

Regards,
-- Al

One more reference:

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=546

Regards,
-- Al

07-30-11: Almarg
I'll add that I recently installed an external (USB) Western Digital advanced format drive on a Windows XP system, without using the alignment utility, and its speed as measured with HD Tune was as good as I would expect from any USB-connected drive.

I should have mentioned in this statement that prior to performing the speed measurement I had re-formatted the drive into multiple partitions, using Windows XP, which defeats the alignment the drive was originally supplied with, and supposedly makes it necessary to use the WD alignment utility. But no speed compromise resulted, even though I didn't use the utility.

Regards,
-- Al

Al, notice there were no performance numbers in the marketing mumbo jumbo. For audio file storage, there is really no problem because it's basically sequential write once, then sequential reads. Anything that leans more towards random reads, and especially random writes, stick with "regular" drives if performance is somewhat critical or more so. That being said, these drives won't be used in "enterprise" class systems or arrays - at least the products I work on won't be using them - where performance counts.

larry