The making of: The Two Towers (a 25 driver Full Range line array)

I think the drives themselves primarily add to the cost. I've used a Synology NAS, a cheap Western Digital NAS and a QNAP NAS etc in the past at work.

My external drive is a WD green, slow as ....

In my workstation I run dual WD black for storage and dual Samsung SSD 850 Pro for the OS. I have a strict policy to replace hard drives after 5 years of duty. The Workstation itself is replaced out of sync to that. My previous PC/Workstation still serves as a mini music studio/Inventor design workstation at my work. That one was bought in 2008. I always run powerful Workstations due to my 3D design hobby. It serves double duty as a Home Theatre setup and music server which is way less taxing.

I'll probably look for WD red drives for the NAS. I've grown fond of Western Digital after having tried many sorts and sizes at work. At home I mostly stick to the WD black.
I hate the slow green drives though.

The bigger Samsung drives were pretty good too but they stepped out of that game. I believe Seagate took up that business...
 
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Hitachi Drives are also very good not so well known but I have a very old one that is still going well beyond when it should have died.

I also saw a comment on a forum from a data recovery specialist who rated Hitachi as the most robust drives and easiest to recover from the worst damage.

I have no loyalty as I have got WD, Seagate, Samsung, SanDisk and Intel :)

The only brand I would never buy again is OCZ SSD's I had some bizarre issues where the drive would just vanish without a trace and need to be reformatted. After the third vanishing act I decided that it was not a glitch and threw it away!
 
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I've had the OCZ and was lucky, but I've heard a lot of disastrous stories about them from friends. It's on my reject list too.

I've been looking around a bit and a QNAP with 4 disks seems reasonable. Now trying to decide if I want to go for 3 or 4 TB disks... I want 4 TB obviously, and it's cheaper per TB. I've put this off way too long. It's going to be ordered this week. Whatever I choose. Still I'd like a fat UPS some day as well :). Always more wishes...
 
Hmm... that is interesting... those HGST make for a good choice.
If I had know a few hours earlier I would have tried those.

Maybe I was too cryptic, HGST = Hitachi Global Storage Technology ;) Now owned by WD

Hitachi Drives are also very good not so well known but I have a very old one that is still going well beyond when it should have died.

Seems I posted after your edit, yep I did try but those WD drives are still good. Keeping them cool is a good way to extend the life.
 
Maybe I was too cryptic, HGST = Hitachi Global Storage Technology ;) Now owned by WD

The minute I saw the Blackblaze list I knew :).

Seems I posted after your edit, yep I did try but those WD drives are still good. Keeping them cool is a good way to extend the life.


I may still exchange them. The HGST are 7200 rpm vs 5400 for the WD RED.
I still got time, I ordered the QNAP from Germany and it won't be here for a couple more days. To top off the bad judgment on my side, I found the HGST € 1,00 cheaper. I would have paid at least € 1,00 more for them (lol).

Reading this, I'm so glad I have only a chromebook "computer". I have suspected for a long time that if I ever went down the normal computing road there would be no turning back and be next to impossible to ever escape and be free again!

Without my PC I'd be lost! I'll never be free again... :eek:
 
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If you use CrystalDisk (freeware) you can examine the HD SMART status for signs of trouble. I'm not sure if every NAS box (or MB RAID) will allow you to "see through" to the SMART data. Its easy to check, some provide their own utility for it. When the "reallocated sector" and "pending sector" counts start trending higher you'll soon have problems. A few relocated sectors is OK as long as the count is stable.

NAS or RAID is never a replacement for backups, that are on a separate disk stored in a separate location. Your NAS controller board and power supply can fail too, and the NAS disk set may not be readable by a different controller / OS.
 
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Reading this, I'm so glad I have only a chromebook "computer". I have suspected for a long time that if I ever went down the normal computing road there would be no turning back and be next to impossible to ever escape and be free again!

You have FLASH based storage (like SSD) and it has a write cycle limitation known as the endurance limit. You can only write each sector a certain number on times before the sector is "retired" and will no longer store properly. So newer systems (unlike older Android) will cycle though the entire FLASH to spread out the activity over many sectors. Its why you never defragment an SSD, you're burning up its life. It can fail, only in a different way ;)
 
.....One thing I know for sure, the difference between good and great sound is very very small. Mind you, I still have good sound with my older saved settings. The difference that made it sound great was subtle at best. Which is why it wasn't a good idea to change 4 things at once trying to get it back in a hurry. I grew into it the first time and will try to do so again.....

Have used tons of hours last ten days to get a new CPU/motherboard/memory to perform great sound stream ;) you know the "eyebrows" and based on that study and to be constructive your situation have some settings to share you could try out to see if it can help also your platform, settings should make no harm simply just change them back if Zappa don't agree.


1. In "regedit" set below string to "14", role for that number is to set "Foreground and bag ground applications equally responsive" (where Win7 default is really "18" if one via GUI button set it for bag ground services and 26 if one set it to best foreground application response time which is default, but sometimes after a fresh install it starts as a older OS setting of 2 instead of 26 until one accidently over time hit ok button in the GUI).
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2. Set ASUS ASIO control panel to 80mS as below.
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3. Set JRiver ASIO buffer to 500mS as below.
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4. Set virtual memory as below where first number is taken from "Taskmgr" and second number is first x2, in study tried in general three different settings where one was default as Win7 set it and another one was ala Win10 to set it to very low numbers including the lowest possible but below was champ soundwise.
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In general the four above tweaks was convincing in they worked on three different platforms one was E3-1270/C206/8Gb and new one was I7-6700K/Z170/16Gb and the old one to exchange is AMD APU A8-3870/A75/8Gb, but below point five was a bit surprising compared to old studys in the two Intel platforms had to have HPE timer turned off to get a Zappa smile. Especially the new Skylake platform was surprising in with HPE timer turned on DPC Latency raised to sky high where in past studies it used to help on latency, but a reason can be MS has modded kernel behavior down the road and ported their experience from Win8/8.1/10. By the way the new platform have stunning DPC lantency numbers with out HPE timer, with no task loaded it hovers gladly around lowish 3-12uS numbers.


5. So for this point use ear and tools as DPC Latency Checker/LatencyMon/WinTimerTester to test if HPE timer should be turned on or off via cmd prompt as admin, "bcdedit /set useplatformclock true" then restart computer and off again "bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock" then restart computer.


6. When using ASUS soundcards ST/STX/STX II Win7 timer resolution is taking care of in ASUS driver software that set it to low 1mS and that should in my test be good enough when above HPE timer is on, but if HPE timer is off think use Lucas Hale tool to improve stream "Timer Resolution 2.0" to set it at lowest Win7 setting 0,5mS (link Timer Resolution – Lucas Hale).
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NAS or RAID is never a replacement for backups, that are on a separate disk stored in a separate location. Your NAS controller board and power supply can fail too, and the NAS disk set may not be readable by a different controller / OS.

I'm well aware of that limitation, Don.
But it isn't wrong to spread your data, I have it in 2 places with Raid mirror.
With the NAS I'll create mostly backup space in Raid 5 that will be powered off of a different group electrically. I will use part of it as storage for movies (mainly for my son, it takes up a lot of space on my workstation right now). As I have physical copies of those movies, they will have to do being stored on Raid 5.
The NAS will be for ease of use and having 4 copies of everything that's important to me. To add cloud storage goes a bit too far for my personal use. I'm fond of my data, however I don't rely on it. I do have limited online storage for private stuff that matters to me.

Looking for ease of use really, I'm aware of the choices and their drawbacks.
For most of it I was OK with the safety of mirrored drives with important data backup elsewhere. However the ease of having regularly backup copies automated will limit my own involvement and limit the: "yeah I'll do it next week" attitude.
My external drive only goes so far, I need some extra space anyway, why not add a bit of room + a sense of safety ;).
I used to run everything automated, even had a tape streamer in the past. However a photography hobby and lately having both audio and video stored digitally ran the numbers of space I needed up high.
 
Thanks for the reminder BYRTT, while I did have most of those settings right on my previous install I did not check all of them after a complete re-install.

Right now I'm not yet up and running as I'd like to be. I'm still installing stuff I want back from my old setup. Little and larger tools still need to be installed.
The advantage of a Windows backup (which I do have) is to be able to browse the backup as a virtual drive so I can peek what and how I used to run.
 
Sorry I'm late... Once I lost over a year of work of Verilog programming on a video 1080p FPGA project due to HDD failure. It was enough to make me quit, as I was a novice Verilog programmer. This was over 3 years ago. The backups I usually made were months old and of course did not include the breakthroughs I had made...
Now I have a RAID5 array using 3 1TB WD black drives. I believe the drives were about $100US each almost 2 years ago. This is a good start for archiving 'breakthroughs'.

Anyway, I wanted to chime in because I had read someone posted that they recommended an external HDD for another source of redundant backup.
Screw HDD, I entirely favor SDHC flash cards now. No moving parts, resistance to magnetic fields, etc. 32GB SDHC are cheap now. I paid $108US for my 8GB SDHC when it first came out and it still works great while switching between my camera and laptop. Many years of trouble free service!

Hope you find the path you've lost.
 
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But it isn't wrong to spread your data...
This! Backups are all about redundancy.

I haven't used a QNAP yet but can offer some general thoughts.

As already posted, automatic backup/sync is best. IME, mirroring your document folders between the NAS & client device(s) is the best approach. With 2+ exact copies, you still have access to your files should any device fail. HD redundancy keeps the computer running if a disk fails, and data mirroring keeps the system running if a computer fails.

When I recommend mirroring document folders, I mean it literally. Keep the entire tree, because you already know where everything is on your workstation, so having it exactly the same on your server just makes life easier. Obviously, you don't need to duplicate all workstation data, just don't fool with the structure for what you do copy.

And the server is the authoritative source to keep multiple clients in sync.

Portable software works REALLY well in this sort of setup. Backing up portable apps & their settings is no problem, obviously, and being able to run software from the NAS in a pinch adds a nice bonus.

Enable NAS snapshots whenever possible. They provide a great safety net when a sync goes wrong or a client deletes/encrypts a shared volume. And you can probably store more monthly/weekly/daily snaps than you'd guess.

A smaller share for work in progress can snap every 5-15 minutes with 24-hour retention if you use it only for "normal" files. Editing HD video there might not be so great...

Consider making sync tasks that backup to an external drive on demand. Modifying your automatic jobs won't take long (the source folders are the same), and you really should keep an offline backup, even if it's updated less often.

Regarding sync software, I've been pretty satisfied with FreeFileSync. It's cross-platform (learn once, run everywhere!) & open-source, though the Windows installer offers optional adware (just say no). And the developer recently nerfed the portable version for $ donations.

Besides that, FFS is very flexible, allows archiving replaced/deleted files to folders you choose, and is easy to run via batch. I find building sync tasks in the GUI is a lot easier than using Robocopy or similar, and combining several sync tasks into 1 batch job with logging takes only a minute.

Of course, there are a zillion sync tools, so try a few.

It's late. This is long. Any questions?