Melco Audiophile NAS

[MikeSpragg]

(13-09-2015 22:12)Peter@57m Wrote:  However, I did try running in raid 1 format and found this degraded the sound compared with running the disks as one big disk. I now run as one big disk and use my old NAS drive as backup. In fact I rip to my QNAP and have a utility setup to copy the files to the Melco.

Simon and I discussed the sound difference and assumed it must be that raid 1 is running both disks rather than just the one that the currently playing music is on, and the extra power demand for the disks is causing the difference. Can't think of any other reason.

As delivered the N1A is quiet enough for the HiFi rack, if you change the disks that might change.

The Melco has three RAID types. Only RAID1 provides any form of redundancy in case of drive failure.

Spanned Array (default setting)
This is one logical volume using the 2x2TB making 4TB in total. However, if either drive fails the whole volume is lost. The first drive in the volume fills up before the 2nd is used.

RAID0
1 logical volume as above but data is striped across both disks. Offers faster read performance (not needed for streaming). Either drive fails, entire volume is lost. Both drives are used for reading/writing depending on operating needs.

RAID1
This is a disk mirror. The volume size is exactly half of the total drive capacity - in this case 2TB. Each 2TB drive is a mirror of the other and provides redundancy should 1 drive fail. Data is written concurrently to both drives at same time. There is no read performance unless the software controller handles that (random reads from either drive).

It should be noted that in all cases the drives are spun up continually within the Melco regardless of RAID setup.