Buying a NAS drive - MacBook

I’m fond of SYNOLOGYY, not fond of WESTERN DIGITAL Cloud devices.

A this point NAS drives and SONOS defaults will transparently deal with SMB. Most will block SMBv1.

Thank you… I also am not fond of Western Digital… I had one of their hard drives once and it packed up with all my information on it and I could never retrieve it! That was some years ago now, but still… once bitten… I’m not sure what it means to say that “most will block SMBv1”. As I understand it, I should go for one that uses SMBv2 or 3… I guess that’s what you mean…. Sonos itself wouldn’t allow use of SMBv1.

By default modern NAS drives and computer operating systems will not include SMBv1 support. Sometimes if you dig enough you can find or enable support. Recently I had to backup an old SMBv1 only drive.

lolakatkin:

 107GB is not an issue.  I have over 2TB of music on my NAS which indexes just fine.

Hi @lolakatkin, QNAP and Synology are the biggest names in home NAS drives. Asustor is another respectable choice. At the risk of stating the obvious, a single-drive NAS is less expensive than a multi-drive NAS … if you have a backup of your music library that is a viable option.

Thank you, that is very helpful.

Do you really need a new NAS these days?

Just to throw another option into the mix. I had ripped all CDs to ALAC using iTunes, stored on local NAS. I had NAS for some time, and then subscribed to iTunes Match, and uploaded all my music to iTunes Match, including some unique MP3s, not available on iTunes. Then came along Apple Music subscription that included iTunes Match. I don’t need a NAS to play my music library, its in the cloud. It means I can access from anywhere, and non Sonos devices. All play lists are in Apple Music. Sonos Apple Music can access my ‘local library’ that is stored on Apple servers. There are some limits though, 100,000 songs upto 200MB each, which is 20TB?

https://support.apple.com/is-is/guide/music/musa3dd5209/mac

You can access your 20TB virtual NAS from Apple Music play via AirPlay, or play from Sonos Apple Music Service. You don’t need to learn about NAS configuration, SMB malarky, NAS backups, electricity to power the NAS, etc.

It’s horses for courses as they say. 

Much depends on how reliable your internet is and how much you are willing to depend on it completely, along with whether or not you collect physical medium like CD’s etc. 

I prefer to have my CDs ripped to a NAS which shares the same files between Sonos, Apple Music and Minimserver. I do this for a variety of reasons, but one significant one is car use, where with phones having such huge storage these days I can have over 3000 songs on my phone and using Wireless CarPlay which uses WiFi instead of Bluetooth, you get much better quality and don’t rely on highly variable cellular connectivity whilst driving, including abroad. I can use Qobuz, Spotify etc. if I want to as well but never worry about dropout’s… 

I do winder if a single drive NAS with a large 4TB SSD would be more reliable than a traditional HD as there no spin up/down all the time, and you mostly read and only write when adding new music, so would appear to play towards SSD longevity and would presumably generate less overall and less noise helping the NAS itself last longer too. Much depends on budget of course. 

I’ve used Netgear and Synology NAS units and would highly recommend Synology. Can’t comment on QNAP as have never used one, but they appear to be well thought of.