A: Cubase 10.5
B: Win 7
C: Kontakt, Toontrack

 

Hi tzzsmk!

I'm thinking about getting some kind of NAS solution for backups. Heard good things about TrueNas... Did you consider it before going the Synology route?

Would you care to explain how you use you NAS more in depth? I'm quite the noob when it comes to NAS and how to use it in a music production system. Do you backup to the NAS also or do you have a separate backup system? Do you stream your kontakt libraries from the NAS do you just store them there?

 

A: Cakewalk by Bandlab
B: Windows 11
C: Everything I can get my hands on...

 

I considered TrueNas few years after going the Synology route, using both nowadays for different purposes,
TrueNas Scale offers versatility and freedom of hardware choices, Synology offers reliability and own software,

NAS is basically an overpriced computer with weak hardware, slow cpu, and lack of RAM - good thing is, it's efficient for 24/7 operation not consuming much power (even when compared to M1 MacMini),

its storage is built on a RAID, which is not a backup, but more of a zero-downtime operation solution, and potentially squeezing higher performance from HDDs at high capacity (10s of TBs), as data is read/written across multiple drives within a pool,
storage pools use different filesystem (Btrfs on Synology, ZFS on TrueNas) and RAID types offer choice of 1-2 HDD fault tolerance, pool capacity resizing,
access is via web UI, apps, network shares (SMB, AFP, NFS) independent from operating system, device platform, all designed for simultaneous multi-user (multi-device) operation,
there's also iSCSI which behaves like as if storage was directly connected to one computer (I don't use that personally),

if you go TrueNas way, you can pick any reasonably old computer, something like 10 years old i7-4770 with 32GB ram is very decent start (outperforming most consumer-grade NAS boxes), but from software point of view, it requires bit of patience and skills to make it work (bit like Windows vs Mac debate), I'm hosting TrueNas Scale as virtual machine on Proxmox, next to my testing Windows 11 and MacOS Ventura virtual machines,

with Synology, you get some in-house software tools to achieve things without need to search online for Docker images/apps, that's what you pay for within the cost of the NAS box itself,
I can do things like (legally) download and store installers, libraries, send mixes to clients, host Audio Station - kind of private lossless quality Spotify etc..,
it really gives me freedom and peace of mind when doing some OS upgrades/reinstalls of my PCs and Macs, I no longer need to bother searching stuff on various usb sticks and external drives, of which some are either formatted on Windows or Mac (and systems can't see write on them vice-versa),

I also use kind of private, self-hosted Dropbox/GoogleDisk alternative called Synology Drive, which flawlessly syncs some stuff across my devices (including iOS devices, which are really picky about not letting you transfer things without using iCloud), accessible ever from outside of LAN, safely,
full backups are also possible (TimeMachine support for Mac, and some hosted software for Windows), but I don't really bother, since there's not much stored on computers' internal drives anymore,

I don't use Kontakt much, but when I do, it's from internal or external SSD - even casual USB 3.0 + SATAIII SSD is still so much faster compared to networked storage of NAS, I couldn't even justify going for overpriced full 10Gbe LAN

it's also possible to try Xpenology, which is kind of "Synology hackintosh", that can be also virtualized, but some features may not work, and definitely not reliably, so it's not handy for my particular use cases

 

A: Mixcraft 9
B: Win 10 64bit
C: Fabfilter, IkMultimedia (mainly the TRacks, it handles all the mixing and mastering plus effects), Nembrini, NeuralDSP, MLSoundLab.
Obviously there are many others, but these are a staple on any project

 

A: Cakewalk Bandlab
B: Win 10
C: Use most - Spectrasonics, Korg, TAL
Best - Hard to decide. Maybe Fabfilter, Overloud, Newfangled, UVI Falcon

 

Thanks for the info.

If I'm not getting this wrong, I believe that with TrueNAS you can set it up so the pool is resilient against harddrive failures. Depending on how many simultaneous harddrive failures you want to be resiliant against, you configure your setup in different ways. For example you could configure the system so if 3 of your drives fail at the same time you could just pop in three new drives and the system would rebuild the pool.

Together with ZFS snapshots being able to go back to previous files versions... couldn't you say that running TrueNAS you might not need backups, because the system is resilient to harddrive failures + you can go back to previous file versions like with Time Mashine?

Or am I missing something?

PS I don't think the i7 is good for TrueNAS because it doesn't support ECC memory

 

A: Pro Tools 2021.12
B: Windows 11
C: No particular software company, but mostly use UAD and SSL

 

Reaper and NUENDO
OSX Mojave
Sonible and all other companies that are truthful

 

Ableton Live 11, Synfire Pro 2, Sonible, Virtual DJ, Rip X, Kontakt, Nexus 3, Serum, Toontrack, Arturia, Ample sound, Fabfilter.

Selling AxeFX II, UAD OCTO, Midisport 8x8, Delta 1010LT card on Ebay
https://www.ebay.com/sch/lucysammusic/m.html?item=155240183431&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.m3561.l2562

 

A: Studio One
B: Windows 10
C: Waves, Fabfilter, DMG, Acustica

 

A: Mixcraft 9 Pro Studio
B: Windows 10
C: Acoustica (Mixcraft)

 

Cubase Pro 12
Windows 11 Pro
VST, Alliance, Waves, FabFilter

 

Reaper
Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021
WAVES

 

Mixcraft 9 Pro Studio
Windows 10
SSL 9000k Abbey Road plugins Softube