NAS hardware requirements

[toscana]

Hi everyone,

I am contemplating the purchase of a NAS as a music Server running minimserver. I am looking at either a qnap ts-119p II or a Synology ds112. The qnap seems to be a good choice but I much prefer the Synology GUI. However, I have concerns if the ds112 is powerful enough to run minimserver smoothly considering the slower processor and less RAM compared to the qnap. Has anyone experience with running minimserver on a ds112?
Another option would be the ds112+ which seems to have an ARM processor unlike the ds213+ which has a PPC. But if a ds112 is sufficient this would be my preferred choice.

Thanks.

[simoncn]

(01-03-2013 16:33)toscana Wrote:  Hi everyone,

I am contemplating the purchase of a NAS as a music Server running minimserver. I am looking at either a qnap ts-119p II or a Synology ds112. The qnap seems to be a good choice but I much prefer the Synology GUI. However, I have concerns if the ds112 is powerful enough to run minimserver smoothly considering the slower processor and less RAM compared to the qnap. Has anyone experience with running minimserver on a ds112?
Another option would be the ds112+ which seems to have an ARM processor unlike the ds213+ which has a PPC. But if a ds112 is sufficient this would be my preferred choice.

Thanks.

The DS112 has a 1.6 GHz ARM processor. This should be more than adequate for running MinimServer. I'm running MinimServer on a NAS with a 1.2 GHz ARM processor, and I'm happy with the performance.

[winxi]

(01-03-2013 16:33)toscana Wrote:  Hi everyone,

I am contemplating the purchase of a NAS as a music Server running minimserver. I am looking at either a qnap ts-119p II or a Synology ds112. The qnap seems to be a good choice but I much prefer the Synology GUI. However, I have concerns if the ds112 is powerful enough to run minimserver smoothly considering the slower processor and less RAM compared to the qnap. Has anyone experience with running minimserver on a ds112?
Another option would be the ds112+ which seems to have an ARM processor unlike the ds213+ which has a PPC. But if a ds112 is sufficient this would be my preferred choice.

Thanks.

Hi, I have a DS211, whose CPU/RAM specifications are similar to the DS112 and I'm facing no performance issues (nor do I face other issues with MinimServer ).

[toscana]

Thanks to both of you for the feedback.
I was more concerned with the lower RAM but that does not seem to be a problem if it is running fine in a DS211.
Can you elaborate on the noise level of the synology. I will have to position the NAS in the living room and need something quiet.

Thanks

[simoncn]

(01-03-2013 23:43)toscana Wrote:  Thanks to both of you for the feedback.
I was more concerned with the lower RAM but that does not seem to be a problem if it is running fine in a DS211.
Can you elaborate on the noise level of the synology. I will have to position the NAS in the living room and need something quiet.

Thanks

You should be OK with 256 MB of RAM. There is a very small chance that this might not be enough if you're running MinimServer with a very large music library with a complex tag structure and you're also running other things on the NAS that consume a large amount of RAM.

If you're expecting to keep the NAS for a few years, and you're willing to spend a bit more money for some future-proofing on the RAM side, it might be worth considering the DS112+ which has 512 MB of RAM. This is currently available for £186 compared with £161 for the DS112.

[winxi]

(01-03-2013 23:43)toscana Wrote:  Thanks to both of you for the feedback.
I was more concerned with the lower RAM but that does not seem to be a problem if it is running fine in a DS211.
Can you elaborate on the noise level of the synology. I will have to position the NAS in the living room and need something quiet.

Thanks

All I can say about the noise level is that the DS211 is really quiet and that the fan is barely hearable even when you are near the NAS, but this is my subjective feeling of course. The HDD involved is definitely more significant to the noise level than the fan. Note that the DS112 may have a smaller (and thus more audible) fan due to the smaller housing.

(02-03-2013 12:39)simoncn Wrote:  If you're expecting to keep the NAS for a few years, and you're willing to spend a bit more money for some future-proofing on the RAM side, it might be worth considering the DS112+ which has 512 MB of RAM. This is currently available for £186 compared with £161 for the DS112.

Considering the small difference in price, I would also recommend the DS112+. Besides doubled RAM, it has even more CPU power.
The following is not directly related to MinimServer, but for example with my DS211 (1.6 GHz ARM) I realized that it is not able to do realtime transcoding flac -> mp3 using ffmpeg. BubbleUPnP Server would have required this for reducing bandwidth when streaming over a mobile connection. I now have done offline transcoding for my flac-collection, and thus have a partially doubled library. With the DS112+, the chances are good that it would be even able to do flac -> mp3 online transcoding.
However, with the flac -> wav transcoding provided by MinimServer there are no performance issues even with my DS211. But you never know what else comes up in the future .

[simoncn]

(02-03-2013 13:37)winxi Wrote:  The following is not directly related to MinimServer, but for example with my DS211 (1.6 GHz ARM) I realized that it is not able to do realtime transcoding flac -> mp3 using ffmpeg. BubbleUPnP Server would have required this for reducing bandwidth when streaming over a mobile connection. I now have done offline transcoding for my flac-collection, and thus have a partially doubled library. With the DS112+, the chances are good that it would be even able to do flac -> mp3 online transcoding.
However, with the flac -> wav transcoding provided by MinimServer there are no performance issues even with my DS211. But you never know what else comes up in the future .

The flac -> mp3 issue is caused by the much higher cost of lossy encoding compared with lossless decoding. See this thread for some interesting discussion about this. Doing flac -> wav transcoding requires lossless decoding only.

I'm looking into the possibility of supporting other transcoding combinations in the future. I'll bear in mind that real-time mp3 encoding might not be possible on ARM-based NAS devices that don't have an FPU. This might change if a future version of ffmpeg adds support for fixed-point mp3 encoding.

[winxi]

(02-03-2013 15:48)simoncn Wrote:  The flac -> mp3 issue is caused by the much higher cost of lossy encoding compared with lossless decoding. See this thread for some interesting discussion about this. Doing flac -> wav transcoding requires lossless decoding only.

Thanks for this very interesting pointer. I've tried the ffmpeg version compiled by patters for the Serviio package for ARM architecture. In fact, with this it is possible to do flac -> mp3 realtime transcoding on the DS211.

[toscana]

Thanks again for your feedback. Will probably go for one of the two.