A DAAP-oriented LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini NAS review

[eldino]

Hi folks,
I did a DAAP-oriented review of Lacie Ethernet Mini Disk NAS and i want to share it with you all. If you are planning to buy a nas for your streaming needs and you have a big music collection, please read my experience first, you could save some money and spend em better 😉

The review is on my blog (sorry admins for spamming!):
http://eldino.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/en-is-lacie-ethernet-disk-mini-the-ultimate-daap-server/

Im gonna buy a microatx computer with 1tb on it to do the trick instead of this NAS, I hope i will get enough power to achieve my goal using a complete but compact pc 😉

Regards,
eldino

Ps. for every question about this NAS, just reply here 😉 I will try to answer you the best i can 🙂

[EVILRipper]

I had the same problem as you. The NAS was not fast enough.
Next to that, I needed more than just firefly. I use SSH, FTP, webserver, DB, torrents (!) aswell.
I survived using all those on the Conceptronic CH3SNAS. (MediaStore)
It has a 500mhz proc and 64mb ram.
Still, in idle, 128 ram was used. (Standard 64mb from swap, ouch!)
This resulted in real slow response times, and worst of all, when doing a DAAP list, it took about 10 seconds to index all files. (I have 100GB of music. ~20K songs.)

A week or 2 back I was sick of the slowness, so I bought a compact PC.
Believe it or not, it is smaller than the CH3SNAS. I bought the Intel Atom 230 (which is in the Asus EEE 901 series) on a mITX board. Of course, with the necessary extra hardware: Power, HD, Case, RAM.

In the end I ended up paying 2X as much for the case than for the motherboard+proc. Why? Because there was no decent case for what I wanted. All mITX cases out there are quite small, and I wanted a passive cooler on the board. So the only case with the needed height above the MBoard was quite expensive.

Right now, I’m at work, listening to my music using the server.
The speed increase is incredible. The indexing of music is instant instead of 10 seconds, and it even runs an X desktop! (Linux with GUI, for non-linux people)

In the end, I ended up at ~400 euros with the following specs:
– Intel Atom 230 @ 1.6GHz
– Onboard GMA350(?) Intel Accelerated Graphics
– 2GB RAM
– 750GB HDD

I’m very happy with this toy. 🙂

[eldino]

Hi EVILripper, thx for comment 🙂

I ended up buying a dedicated computer too and i spent ca. 400 euros as you did.

Here the specs of my baby:

– Motherboard Asus P5KPL-WM – (43 €);
– CPU Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180 2.0 Ghz – (56 €);
– Case HTPC Antec NSK2480 with 80Plus 380w PSU included – (89 €);
– RAM 2×2gb Kingston KVR800D2N5/2G 800mhz DDR2 – (60 €);
– Hard Disk Western Digital WD10EACS Green Power SATA2 1Tb – (139 €);
– DVD-burner Asus DRW2014S1T SATA Silver – (22 €);
– Hard disk Seagate PATA 500Gb – (0 €).

Here the pic:

iTunes manages my 90000+ tracks library easily with all this horsepower and im very happy and proud of this baby 🙂 The case is really well designed, robust and aesthetically great (im a Mac user, the design of the tech stuff I buy is important!)..

I finally solved all my problems with my gargantuan music collection 😉

[fizze]

This is a very helpful thread, thanks for sharing those findings with all of us 🙂

When using torrents on an embedded device you have to choose the client carefully, there are HUGE differences.
Python is not for the faint of heart, for instance 😉

How is the noise of such a PC?
How do you guys handle storage? Local HDs in the case, I presume?

[eldino]

@fizze wrote:

How is the noise of such a PC?
How do you guys handle storage? Local HDs in the case, I presume?

My mp3server is very silent, a lot more silent than the Lacie NAS 😉
I bought those components also coz they are not noisy (ex. WD Green Power HD) 😉

Yeah, I will add other 1tb or 1,5tb disks in the case when I will need more space 😉 simple, cheap and easy 🙂

[Author]

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