Recommendations for a SSD NAS for Sonos S2

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!!