Thanks for the great feedback on our continuing ideas on music storage and how to best build a library from a hardware perspective. Several of you have asked me what my recommendations are for putting together a solid foundation for a library and I'll start to detail them here.
A NAS can be a good building block for a library if two conditions are met: it's a small library (less than 500mB), or you invest in a really good NAS. So what's a really good NAS? In a word - expensive.
To do it right the NAS must have built in backup capabilities - which means it's going to have to be twice the size you're ever going to need for starters. Next, the NAS should be expandable in case your library grows. These are fairly tall orders if you consider where we started, with a 1tB cheap NAS which has none of these features.
So yes, you can go this route if the one single advantage a NAS offers is important to you: working without a computer and using the built in computer on a NAS.
But if you're ok with using your computer, what then is the best alternative to a NAS?
We'll look at that side tomorrow.
