NAS Specs...What do they mean and do they matter for Audio?

Oops. I forgot SBAF is the home of the phonograph wax cylinder and robust 8-track tape.

 

No need to get snarky.

 

Sorry about the dislike, nothing personal, but... There is no mean time between lightening strikes; there is no mean time between house fires, burglaries, floods, or children pouring water into gear. RAID is not a backup, in no way, shape or form is it a backup... and whether it is vital commercial documents, family photos, or just music that can re re-sourcd, but still took hours to collect, digitise, organise etc, if it has any meaning at all, to ordinary folk, it must be backed up with a copy kept somewhere else.

I am ex-IT admin. My current personal backup regime, by my professional standards of 20 years ago sucks. I take backups approximately once a week, and swap out a disk approximately every week. My exposure to disaster is, at least, limited. On a good day I could walk out of the house with my digital past and present in my pocket. Been there, done that, in the face of flood, and too many people here have also seen fire and other nasty stuff of nature.

Backups are not for nerds, not even offsite backups. Electrical surges that take out all the plugged-in electronics? Not rare enough.

So throw away all that mean time between failure stuff: it is irrelevant. Or else... house insurance, etc, is also for super nerds.

Backups are for everyone. Tears are for the people who think otherwise.

 

At least no one is talking about how different RAID setups or hard drives sound. I think CA even had a thread on how SD cards sounded.

 

@Thad E Ginathom I don't disagree with any of the points you've raised above. What I can disagree with is that you cannot expect everyone to adhere to that level of technical clout. For the extreme majority of general people and especially audiophiles that I've dealt with directly, I consider it mission accomplished when I can get them to understand the value of a good NAS with local redundancy. There are some people who do want to engage in it to the degree you are describing. In my experience most do not.

Data storage is the type of problem that has a technically justifiable, highly complex solution. But not everyone is asking for that. Most people want to find the most reasonable compromise. It's a function of risk management and for the larger portion of the population they are not trying too hard to mitigate risk. We know that because they buy an Aurender with a single Western Digital Green HDD and put all of their music on it. Or they have a single drive 4TB external HDD and call it good. They didn't keep their CD's or records in a fire proof safe either.

We can definitely try to teach OP how to follow the strictest standards for ensuring his digital files outlive him and his heirs, but my interpretation is that isn't what he's looking for.

 

You do not seem to understand that in most cases data is not being lost because of the hardware failure but because it is messed up by software, sometimes NAS software, or by human error. So Raid and reliable hardware is about availability, it has nothing to do with data security.

 

I present to you, the ultimate musical backup system.

Enjoy.

(Budget friendly too.)

 

It's a requirement to RTFM. If we can't trust someone to not click "format this disk" at an inappropriate time, we definitely can't expect them to commit to Thad's method of robust data storage and offsite backups. If someone here finds a solution that works for everyone in every scenario and solves the data storage method with zero drawbacks, you will have won the internet.

 

You understand even less than I thought: there are known cases when iTunes wiped out the music directories, documented cases of low tech encryption viruses etc. And iTunes and viruses do NOT RTFM.

 

If the software is the inherent problem to the OP's requests, why is he not asking for help to determine which software he needs to use to ensure security of his music files? He also did not mention using ITunes so I don't see it expunging his music collection anytime soon. I understand that the basis of your argument is anecdotal and this thread has derailed into a bunch of people thinking they can flex nuts on the internet because they know how to computer.