Anyone using a RAID ethernet server?

Posted by MarkEL (A) on April 2, 2007 at 15:46:51

I've been looking into ways to set up a RAID ethernet music server for my iTunes library. Here is what I've narrowed things down to. Please comment.

1. Connection to giga-ethernet router. I have a 10/100/1000 wired ethernet connection (via Cat 5e) from the Mac Powerbook in my listening room to the router my LAN closet, where I have a D-LINK DIR-655 giga-ethernet draft 802.11n wireless router, which is also connected to a cable modem and wirelessly connected to airport expresses for printers, whole house niles home audio system, and secondary audio system.

2. Connection to main rig. On the powerbook in the main listening room I'm running iTunes, with music in apple lossless, via USB to a Scott Nixon USBTD, usb tube dac. At some point, I'll probably upgrade this to one of the Wavelength USB tube DAC's, but for now, it sounds fine.

3. Proposed music server. I currently have 100GB of lossless music, but this will grow to over 500GB pretty quickly as I rip my LP's to digital using my Alesis Masterlink. The best solution seems to be the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. The ReadyNAS has 4 drive bays, which holds up to 2.25TB in RAID 5 using 4 750MB drives, but I'll probably start out with 3 500MB drives with 1TB in RAID 5. RAID 5 is secure, so if any drive fails, I won't lose any data. ReadyNAS is fast, with up to 25MB/s read and 12MB/s write speeds on a giga-ethernet wired connection. I'll make DVD-ROM backups for offsite archival storage, but otherwise there is no need for a backup with RAID 5. To avoid crashes, I'll get an APC Smart-UPS, which is connected to the drive via USB to automatically turn it off, while running off of battery power, in the event of a power failure.

4. Streaming/music management software. I plan to move the entire iTunes library to the ReadyNAS. I currently have the library located on an external drive and it works fine.

5. I considered doing this much cheaper with a USB hard drive and a new Apple Airport Extreme, but I didn't think it would be fast enough to handle a large iTunes library. I've read that people have had problems doing this with the new Apple Airport Extreme. Also the Extreme only has 10/100 ethernet, which would be a limiting factor.

Any comments or suggestions?

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Topic - Anyone using a RAID ethernet server? - MarkEL 15:46:51 04/02/07 (2)

Re: Anyone using a RAID ethernet server? - J.Mac 21:44:44 04/02/07 (0)

Re: Anyone using a RAID ethernet server? - mls-stl 20:21:13 04/02/07 (0)

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