Recommendations for a SSD NAS for Sonos S2

I love my Raspberry Pi and SSD NAS, dirt cheap and so far completely reliable, so if you decide building is an option keep it in mind.

You could also use a Pi as an SMB gateway to your real NAS, even cheaper.

Just tweak the instructions to disable SMB v1.

SMB v1 NAS for Sonos https://stan-miller.livejournal.com/650.html

SMB v1 Gateway https://stan-miller.livejournal.com/357.html

For a while I struggled with an older Buffalo NAS and was getting nowhere. All I wanted to do was backup the data. The drive is being used for an S1 system that will never be updated. I was getting nowhere until I installed the SMBv1 driver on my W10 system. Then I was able to copy the files.

Overall, I like the Synology drives. I suggest avoiding the Western Digital Cloud drives.

In general a NAS is used for high capacity storage and cost per GB hard drives are far more cost effective.

Currently a 14TB Hard drive is ~£210, 4TB ~£70-75, 2TB ~£35

With SSD 4TB start at ~£200 and rapidly go up, 2TB drives which are generally the best price per GB are closer to £100

The primary benefit of SSD and NVME drives is speed of access, both of which are irrelevant for a typical home network as the network is the bottleneck and maxes out transfer speed long before spinning hard drives reach max read/write limits, nevermind the faster SSDs.

SSD’s make little sense in the price sensitive home NAS market currently due to the high cost of the storage devices.

Getting fancy can be expensive but for a Sonos music library server you can get by with a Pi Zero, a $10 USB to SATA cable and an old SSD removed from another system when it was upgraded. The SSD needn’t be big as you hit the file limit before you’d fill up most SSDs.

Thanks all for the replies, but still left with the question as to why nobody ships a NAS with SSD’s fitted.

I am looking for a quick, turnkey solution so won’t be going down the ‘ build one’ route, but appreciate the thought.

I have run hard disk NASs for many years and had to replace hard disks from time to time, my understanding is that an SSD solution will last longer and within reason this is not a cost issue. In fact, over time, IF SSDs have a longer life it may even be cheaper.

You could always  buy a naked (no disks) nas and add your own drives, just make sure the nas to disk interface is what you are expecting.

The why question always has the same answer, nobody thinks they would make money selling one. Maybe look for a niche offering from a boutique vendor?

Thanks Stanley, yes I am headed in that direction, I costed a 2x 2Tbyte SSD Synology DS223j NAS at £429 , a lot of money I know. Point noted about the correct interface.

Not sure why they think they wouldn’t make money they sell both separately.

Oh Mr Spence thinks they shipped the new app with bugs, no, they defeatured it, then added the bugs, bet the drop in share price got his attention. Tosser!

Small Green Computer, SonicTransporter

Very expensive, but ships with SSD.

Small Green Computer, SonicTransporter

Nice little product but like you say a touch pricey, and only one SSD so no RAID.

Cost. 
 

As in: they aren’t cost effective. 

Hi @KLO, I’ve asked the same question! SSDs are reasonably cost effective: $120 buys a brand-name 2TB M.2 PCIe 3 SSD. And yes, yes, yes, I know spinny disks are less expensive.

I think one reason for the dearth of pure-SSD consumer NAS boxes is that SSD performance doesn’t significantly move the needle in the context of a NAS ... spinny disks meet or exceed expectations.

That said, I remain surprised we don’t see a very simple single-M.2-drive NAS. That would deliver low power and okay reliability, in a super-small package, for an attractive price. For those comfortable with a bit of tinkering, a Raspberry Pi 5 plus the M.2 HAT can be yours for $70.

KLO:

 SonicTransporter will accept one external drive connected to it which can supplement the internal drive.  That’s how mine is set up.

A lot of folks using NAS devices write to them a lot, that makes the “higher density / lower lifetime writes” drives a poor choice.

I put a 4 TB SSD in my video security system, a write mostly setup, cost an arm and a leg over a 4 TB 3.5 drive and it was worth the change due to noise/power-use but watching the lifetime slowly decrease in comparison to the previous hard drive that is still just fine after 5 years of use tells me to plan for a replacement every few years.

If I ever buy a new multi-drive NAS I’m seriously considering putting a native (not patched add-on) ZFS file system on the must have list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

Sonos doesn’t need a superfast NAS, so IMHO SSD are a waste of money.

I stream my music from a 13 years old NAS, which has been running 24/7 for most of that time.In performance terms it’s from the ark, but it’s more than adequate.

However, this wouldn’t do for you if you need to run S2. But it does give an indication that you don’t need a hugely powerful NAS just for Sonos.

SSDs offer a lot more than speed.

In my  case my Sonos only NAS has to be silent and have minimal power draw, that made a Raspberry Pi and a junk box SATA SSD a great option. My old Pi 3 happily  serves up  four independent streams with near zero CPU use.

As a write-mostly device even a near end of life SSD pulled from other gear will serve well.

A thumb drive would  have cost more and not fit so nicely under the Pi. Spinning drive, even a 2.5 wouldn't be silent and would use a bit more power. If spun down then I might see timing issues at spin-up too.

Fascinating, I think I am getting a clearer picture now.

My tinkering days are over, no raspberries, soldering, building boxes and lashing up cables, done with all that. One box one power source and one ethernet connection.

Everyone agrees it is not a speed issue, an SSD is not adding anything for SONOS, we have put that to bed.

I am not buying the cost issue either, at least for this particular application (Sonos music library) amortized over years of trouble free use, lower power, no failed drives. In fact the vendor I looked at (Scan) has a 2Tbyte SSD NAS (supplied as separates) at £419 and cheapest Hard disk NAS (4Tbyte) for £429.

The pain is that none of this was necessary, using my old Netgear NAS duo v1 worked great until Sonos intervened.

Hi @KLO, does your NAS hold the only copy of your music library? If yes, naturally you need to plan around reliability.

If you have another copy, consider a single-drive NAS in the $100-150 (diskless) range.

I had a WD NAS Live, while it originally worked it was most aggravating. Very difficult to configure for anything but a basic Windows share, then it hit EOL and seçurity updates ended. Then WD tech support dropped it too.

I'd make the above issues key shopping points. Add in if looking for an ARM based unit, 64 bit, as full support for the 32 bit CPUs is ending on many platforms. My very nice router just got the notice that the upstream OS was dropping 32 bit support and the router vendor would be reduced to best effort support.

Good point press250, a single SSD NAS would be a lower cost solution, and my existing NAS has 167Gbytes of music on it. So I could load new music to the existing NAS and then transfer over to the SSD for Sonos to access.

I take Stanley’s point, the most frustrating thing about the modern digital world is the redundancy built into it, what works today is unlikely to work at some point in the future. I have a 30 year old CD player and amp, if I put a CD into the player and switch the amp on it works!!