External Storage Device

To build great and savvy external storage, you may use a Raspberry Pi board and build up a NAS (network attached storage) server on it. It includes using a USB HDD. You can look through this tutorial - https://eltechs.com/raspberry-pi-nas-guide/

I bought a WD My Cloud 3tb for £85 direct from WD, works very well and couldn't turn it down at that price!. I renamed it but it worked perfectly under the orignal settings.

I found the music folder on my laptop, uploaded all my songs then used the Sonos app on the laptop to add the folder. I think Sonos uses slightly different naming than what you would enter into a windows file explorer window? (/ instead of \ or the other way round!). Browsing via the app on Windows found it straight away.

I bought a WD My Cloud 3tb

Just keep in mind at some point WD will silently quit providing security patched for your drive, as they did for my older version leaving it vulnerable to attacks. My Pi should get updates for many years.

Much like Microsoft no longer patching Windows XP, or Apple no longer supporting OS 6 for Mac. Anything you purchased right now should be good for several years at the least. But yes, technology and software does continue to evolve.

Microsoft's support is pretty reasonable, both in length of time it is offered for and the level of notification they provide for when the support is going away. WD came up short on both of these for me, which is why I warn people.

Now if you got a 5 year, after the purchase support period from WD and they gave you a clear notice on the device that it was out of support I'd be a lot happier with that than the 2 years and silence I got.

You just have to look at a purchase like this WD as a short term deal, one that will have to be made again in a few years or you'll have to live with the risk of known and unpatched bugs. It changes your perception of the value of the device when you realize it has a shorter than expected lifetime.

My WD Live Drive cost me just over $50.00 per year of supported lifetime.

My Raspberry Pi NAS cost me $50 total, not counting the old storage drive I got from my junk box.

A fancier dedicated NAS from another vendor may well cost less per year of supported lifetime than a WD product.

If I get 2 years out of it it works out at less than 50 pence a week..

I have a 20 TB storage server with a Xeon CPU, SAS drives and 4 Gbps network connection. Besides drives, it cost me about $150/year so far (I've had it for quite a while) - same idea, and it's way better supported and faster than a RPI.

Among other things, it can hold movies and my DVR'd shows and serve them up to multiple clients. It's saved me more than its initial cost because it lets me use a single device on each TV, for a long period of time, and greatly slowed my edge device upgrade cycle. Oh, and it removes my cable box fees, too. I've moved from DVDs to Blu-Ray to 3D Blu-Ray, to digital movies, using the same set top boxes with full quality - and I only need one STB to handle photos, music, movies, TV and streaming.

For Sonos though, the dumber and older, the better, and consider it a burner device. Until they do a stack upgrade, their only SMB1 support is going to be a problem, as many NAS devices are coming with SMB1 disabled, and some of them not even available anymore. SMB3 is now the preferred protocol, even by Apple.

My "real" NAS isn't my Raspberry Pi either but I don't want SMB 1 available on it so it wasn't a viable replacement for the WD drive that has been serving Sonos music for years. I had a pile of Pi systems available and was originally just fooling with one when the idea of replacing my now unsupported WD Live with it came to me.

My original Pi v1 B from 2012 is still getting updates with no problems, the Pi Foundation hasn't mentioned an EOL date yet. I hope that is a ways off as I'm using the Pi v1 as an NTP server syncing to a GPS clock chip card.

There are lots of options available for serving Sonos music and the more aware folks are of the options, compromises and costs involved the better choices they can make.

I just plugged a 64 gig memory stick into my Netgear "Readyshare" port. Music folders by artist/album are in a folder named "MUSIC". I tried entering the path in my SONOS app under "Add New Share" as \\readyshare\usb_storage\music, but nothing was found. What should I try?