Streaming audio drive full - way forward?

Hi,

I stream my audio from a 250 GB external USB/Firewire drive that is nearly full. what do you think the best way forward is to increase capacity?

The drive is currently hooked up to a WinXP PC acting as the supplier of audio files to several devices via a wireless network (various Slim devices players). Currently it is connected by Firewire and has Firewire ports. I foresightedly bought this thinking I could daisychain drives if I needed extra capacity. But if I do this with say another 250 GB drive, how will the drives appear to the PC - one big drive or two with different drive letters?

I prefer to achieve the the appearance of one big drive if possible, but at least for slimserver I can get over it if I put a shortcut to the second drive in the music folder of the first: then slimserver will find the files. Do you know what will happen if I daisychain two Firewire drives?

Alternatively, I could just buy a new 500 GB and copy everything across, but then a Firewire external drive would be wasted. What do you think is the cleanest way forward?

Thanks for any opinions.

 

I think the way forward is short-term pain for longer-term gain. Abandon USB/Firewire and switch to NAS. Saying that partly because I find that there are limited numbers of USB/firewire sockets and it's easy to get into needing external USB ports, making it all a bit bodge-prone. Going Ethernet makes it all more cleanly extendable.

Use your existing drive for hot backup/mirroring on the PC.

Whatever single drive you buy is likely to seem too small in a couple of years - will there ever be an end to increasing drive sizes?

I may be wrong, of course.

 

i use 2 internal drves and just have links to both in a root music folder - as i catalogue alphabetically i have 0-9/a-g on one drive and h-z on the other in folders thusly names. slim server doesn;t really bother about it and it actually makes things quicker to find - rather than having to spool through for 0 every time i can start at h if i'm looking for something later on in the alphabet.
this is just me though and what i'm used to.

 

One of these should stop you worrying for a while!

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/32302...B_External_Hard_Drive/Product.html?P36=57NL5G

 

Times like these Linux LVM helps. You can just add or remove disks to the same logical volume as you see fit.

With XP, I'd look at a NAS drive. I did come across a "NAS" front end with a combination of IDE and SATA drives in the background but didn't save the link. If I find it again I'll post it here.

 

It was something like this but could accept multiple drives of different interfaces.

http://www.compushopdirect.com/shop/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=7719

 

Nice link Bob I'm using LaCies so far, but that looks tempting.

I haven't forgotten NAS either, thanks Dev and Nick. I did actually buy a NAS and 4 x 250 GB a while back, intending to configure it as RAID, but then decided not to go that way and haven't built it yet. When I do slot the drives in, can I choose not to run raid and thus have one continuous drive, or is it again four separate NASes in one box?

The area of what I know I don't know is growing! Thanks to the other replies also for the ideas so far.
Edit: this NAS is this IIRC http://www.synology.com/enu/products/CS406series/index.php

 

If you have a recent motherboard with eSATA, you could have something sexy like this....http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/33375...xternal_eSATA_USB_2_0_Hard_Drive/Product.html

Mmmm Seagate.

 

Now that just isn't very healthy. Although, I must admit it looks good.

 

Well I built the Synology CS-406 without too much trouble and configured it as RAID 5 with three disks combining to give one apparent network drive of 750 GB and the fourth drive of 250 GB giving security. I'm currently copying across the 250 GB of music over the wireless network, which is slow but at least I can understand what is happening (using Synctoy to do it.) Emboldened by my success, the next step will be to install slimserver on the NAS using the SSODS installation and see what things are like running from there. If that's OK then I can junk the old PC that it was running on previously. Thanks for the encouragement

 

Hi Steve,

I know you are sorted now but in case someone else is in the same predicament, how about this?:-

http://www.netgear.co.uk/digital_home_sc101.php?type=h

Just stick your IDE drive(s) into this box and map drive to it.

 

Thanks, Dev. Everything is hunky dory now, except I haven't the balls to install the SSODS firware on the NAS so that slimserver runs on it. Also IIRC there is an extra complication to also install extra decoding s/w for m4a, so I have left well alone for the time being.

Some stutter problems turned out to be the router, and once I installed a signal strength meter on a laptop (WiFiSiStr) was able to sniff out weak spots and reposition antennae and kit a bit better.

The Synology CS-406 was a bit overkill but it runs totally problem-free so far. As Dick suggested, I run the old drive as backup and reformatted as ext3 is is still big enough to back up everything (after weeding out duplicates, podcasts, etc.)

 

I am currently investigating and as many of the experienced posters advised, NAS is the way to go.
With some NAS models you can plug in your current HD or any other USB device in to it.

The ones listed below either has Slimserver already installed or can be installed.
Main advantage is that you can stream even when the PC is switched off.

Qnap TS-101
Buffalo Linkstation
Buffalo Terrastation
Infrant ReadyNAS
Linksys NSLU2 Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives
Lacie Ethernet Disk
Kuro Box

DLNA appear to be a new standard that is emerging.
A built-in DLNA server allows you to easily stream multimedia files to any DLNA-based home electronic device.
Don't know much about it; may be someone else can explain.

 

You missed Synology NASes from your list. There is a very well worked out Slimserver installation package from a 3rd party called SSODS

 

Thanks.
Synology DS-406 is awesome!
At around £120, Synology DS-106x box is not bad. Has loads of enthusiasts and support; looking through the net.

 

Hmm looks like they've recently upgraded their products - mine is now changed from CS-406 to CS-407. However, I saw that there was a firmware upgrade to give me full functionality of 407. So I just downloaded it, installed it, and repatched in slimserver 7.5.1. That took about 5 mins after download. Not a unix-cmd in sight Not bad eh? There is a slim discussion forum for 3rd party products like SSODS at http://forums.slimdevices.com/forumdisplay.php?f=18

 

Now all that is left to be done is installing SSODS.
Go for it! If it doesn't workout the first time, just format the HD and start all over.
:JPS:

 

Ah I forgot to mention I did that a while back. It went swimmingly and it actually runs more smoothly than my old PC. I didn't need to install anything extra to handle mfa files as I thought. I'm glad I picked the NAS with extra memory and better processor.