Questions on making server for FLAC playback

And I'm surprised there were Reds in there

Why? The MyCloud is a NAS.

You should be able to find the details of the drive by using windows 'Properties/Hardware' on the selected drive (right-click on the drive in File Explorer). Whether it identifies itself as the basic HDD type, or the MyBook type is open to question.

If it's a USB drive, it is unlikely to be a SATA drive, but will probably use a native USB interface, especially if it's usb3.
 
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I didn't realize it was an NAS. I thought is was just set up to use the cloud. Duh. I should just get it over with and buy an NAS and wipe and sell my external drives. Or....

Could I use an NAS with and external hard drive in a RAID configuration?
 
I didn't realize it was an NAS. I thought is was just set up to use the cloud. Duh. I should just get it over with and buy an NAS and wipe and sell my external drives. Or....

Could I use an NAS with and external hard drive in a RAID configuration?

Just use the external drives for backup. For home use a single drive NAS is typically sufficient. If the drive fails, pop in a new one, restore from backup and you are back in service with minimal fuss. Buy a NAS rated drive, and it should last several years at 24/7 without failure. But you still need to back it up regularly, and to multiple backup drives, that you verify after backup.
 
Why? The MyCloud is a NAS.

CPT - do you have a MyCloud or a MyCloud Home? The reviews I'm reading about the Home version are interesting - that it basically runs through the interweb - but I'm not altogether unsure that isn't what I'm looking for. File sharing and being able to access and stream remotely is what I'm looking for.
 
Not the Home. It isn't a true NAS, and I think it is a much lesser product than the MyCloud; dumbed down, essentially.

IMHO, obviously. But you might like to read some of the early comments on the MyCloud Home user forum.
 
Well, at this point I think I'm just going to try and get my current configuration up and running consistently. The Synology router promises a lot, I just need to get it going.

Thanks.
 
Well, lilwing, it certainly sounds like you know what your doing on certain fronts...

Update: I arranged for Santa to bring me a Synology DS2018j NAS along with two WD 4 TB Red drives (5400 class). I still have two WD 4 TB MyBooks that I was using as music storage/backup. Before adding the NAS I spoke with Synology and confirmed the following:

1) I can use the WD external drives as backup for the NAS via USB.
2) I can span the two NAS drives and the two MyBooks to replicate 8 TB of total storage/backup capacity.
3) Using the RT1900AC router I can set up an FTP site for file transfers as well as stream music remotely.

How this will all really work, is, well, I'm sure another story.

Supposing I can get this set up, (I register about a 3 on the 10 point geek scale), next will be the Pi3 as the server for the music system.

BTW, waiting for Amazon black friday sales, I happened upon sales on the hardware: NAS $135 US, WD Reds $99 each US. Great prices.
 
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30 TB of solid state drives? You must have rich friends.

My DAC (a TubeMagic D1 Plus with upgraded tube and op amps) goes directly to my Marantz 2252B. Insofar as sound quality, in another thread I describe how I run a Denon DCD-820 two ways: one out the coax output through the DAC and one out the regular outputs directly into the amp, so that I can hot switch between the two output methods to compare merely by hitting the monitor button. Doing this shows the external DAC to be superior to the internal DAC in decoding, presence, clarity and overall sound quality.

I am also extremely impressed with the playback of FLAC files through the DAC.

I have not done side-by-side comparisons of DACs so I cannot comment on how my TubeMagic compares to others, but I can say that I really like the warmness that I believe comes from the tube output stage. "Works for me".
 
I know this is a little late but for anyone trying to set up a system like yours who are still researching I will share what I've done so far. I wanted to play music off my desktop tower to my vintage system. Tried Blu tooth from my pc that did not work-couldn't get the blu tooth dongle to work in Windows 7 so I got an Audioengine B1 and a portable SSD drive to put most of the music on and use the laptop to transmit to the Audioengine B1 works great but still no access to all of my digital music. Then it dawned on me that I could access the music off my WD MyCloud which I already had. DUH! I installed the WD software on the laptop to access the WD MyCloud, mapped the drive on the laptop and now my vintage system has access to all of audio files. Eventually I would like to get a network music server and bypass the dac in the B1.
 
Another late comer to the party, sounds like you are on the right track here. I've had a library of FLAC files on my server for years and also transport those files to a DAC hooked up to vintage gear. A bunh of random thoughts that might help.

Avoid USB. Avoid MS/apple solutions. FreeNAS (or in my case ZFS on Solaris based OS) is the best way to go, very stable and no corporate monopolies spying on you/sending data off your network.

WD Reds are a great choice, designed for 24/7 use is true, but the best part is they are designed to spin-down when not in use and therefore save power as well as longevity

My FLAC library is over 30,000 songs and uses less than a TB of storage space. For a music only server, a PAIR of WD Reds mirrored is a good solution. Never used freeNAS but I do know it has ZFS which I use on my server as well. ZFS is very configurable with different RAID layouts possible. Using ZFS' RAID-Z2 capability I have never had to do a backup and never lost any data. In a mirrored solution, both drives would have to die to lose data. In a RAID-Z1 solution you'd have to lose two out of five drives to lose data and the number is higher for RAID-Z2. There is also the consideration of expansion/upgrades. My initial setup had 5 1TB drives. Worked great for about a year then 2TB drives became affordable. With ZFS there was no need to backup the data and recreate the pool with new 2TB drives. ZFS allows you to simply replace each 1TB drive with a 2TB drive (one at a time) and after you replace the last drive the pool is now resized to to capacity of your 5 2TB drives. You can also just add a group of drives to an existing pool to increase capacity as well. I'm a ZFS fanboy as you can tell, been using it on my home server since 2009. Never let me down.

Your home NAS server should be able to share your music/videos filesystems using SMB/CIFS, NFS and DLNA. Once that is setup, EVERYTHING in your house including cell phones can see the files on your local network. For example, I have a TV in the guest bedroom hooked up to a cheap LG bluray player with wifi built in. That can even see my movies because it supports DLNA. I can play movies/music on my phone with VLC because it supports DLNA.

I'm also a big fan of the Raspberry PI 3B+ (built-in wifi) for any kid of transport. Reason being, they are cheap, the software for them is free and the best part is there is always an app on the play store for control of whatever software you install on them.

For stereo music to a DAC and then to a vintage receiver the RPI will need a digital coax out HAT board as well (Hifiberry makes one for around $40 and ALLO makes a great one called the digione for about $100). If you don't have a DAC both those companies also make HATs with a built-in DAC. If you aren't going to run LMS, volumio worked well for me, it has a free phone app as well. When using LMS, I use Orange Squeeze.

For connecting to a TV it's simply a matter of installing OSMC on an SD card, hooking up an HDMI cable to the TV and setting up OSMC to tell it where the home file server stores the video share. Then go get 'Yatse' from the play store and done.

Two more points, one: the WAF for just having to use a cell phone app to control music or movies is very good (at least in my home). The second point is there is no greater feeling in the world than going to the high-end audio store with your wife and her seeing a $15,000 streamer/transport and asking you 'isn't that what we have at home only cheaper?'. Yes honey, wayyyyyyyyyy cheaper. :)
 
Update: I arranged for Santa to bring me a Synology DS2018j NAS along with two WD 4 TB Red drives (5400 class). I still have two WD 4 TB MyBooks that I was using as music storage/backup. Before adding the NAS I spoke with Synology and confirmed the following:

1) I can use the WD external drives as backup for the NAS via USB.
2) I can span the two NAS drives and the two MyBooks to replicate 8 TB of total storage/backup capacity.
3) Using the RT1900AC router I can set up an FTP site for file transfers as well as stream music remotely.

Have you heard about Kodi? If not, you should give it a try. https://kodi.tv

You already have a notebook, NAS, and DAC. Kodi is the player you need for all lossless files.
 
Android-based kodi is poor for audio, IME - it uses Android's audio playback, which is not very good nor capable of being very good at the OS level.

The one exception is via "USB audio player pro" which is an android app that runs its own DLNA renderer and supports bit perfect playback to a USB DAC. But, any audio not run through the app is rendered strangely - Android is first and foremost free software for telephone-quality audio. there have been improvements since the early releases, but they're bolt-ons, not core features.

Windows Kodi is far better for audio, as it supports asio and wasapi for OS-level bitperfect audio.

I have read that OpenElec has better audio support than Android does, and it runs on many of the chips that Android runs on, but I havent investigated it in detail.
 
Android-based kodi is poor for audio, IME - it uses Android's audio playback, which is not very good nor capable of being very good at the OS level.

The one exception is via "USB audio player pro" which is an android app that runs its own DLNA renderer and supports bit perfect playback to a USB DAC. But, any audio not run through the app is rendered strangely - Android is first and foremost free software for telephone-quality audio. there have been improvements since the early releases, but they're bolt-ons, not core features.

Windows Kodi is far better for audio, as it supports asio and wasapi for OS-level bitperfect audio.

I have read that OpenElec has better audio support than Android does, and it runs on many of the chips that Android runs on, but I havent investigated it in detail.

In Kodi setup, you may select "Passthrough" and use an external DAC to decode music files.
I only use Kodi on my Android box, so I don't know how it sounds on other platforms.
 
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