erland already gave a neat summary of the general options, I'd just like to add some of my personal experiences (to make choices even harder ;-)):
1. Loudness: Of course, it is very likely, but a NAS solution might not necessarily be more quiet than a dedicated PC/workstation solution. I personally have my music stored on a Buffalo Linkstation II and this one is significantly louder than my normal workstation (which is an Athlon64 3400+ based Linux workstation which I build explicitely to be as quiet as possible). 2. Power: I use the NAS for the 24/7 music server because it consumes much less power than the PC. If you don't want to waste a significant amount of money it might make sense to go for either a NAS device or an explicite low-power optimized PC solution (there are several threads describing people's projects in the 3rd party hardware forum) or at least setup something like standby mode and wake-on-lan for the PC your slimserver is running on. 3. Performance: As erland wrote the major drawbacks of a pure NAS solution are located in the library scanning and web interface performance. For my 10,000 song library the Linkstation slimserver needs about 4-5 hours for a full re-scan while the Athlon PC does the job in <= 20 minutes. Regarding the web interface, you can find roundabout 10,000 threads here showing that everyone has his/her own perception of the web interface response times on slow server machines. It can take several seconds for some browsing actions to happen if the server runs on a NAS like the Linkstation. For me that's perfectly OK as I am only using the web interface for administration purposes at the moment but I'd like to switch my living room remote to a handheld WLAN device (Nokia770) completely and e.g. for browsing albums by artwork the NAS server performance is unaccepatable, therefore I'm thinking about switching to a PC based server. By the way, the Squeezebox response time for use with the standard remote is perfectly fine even with a NAS based server. Hope this helps you somehow to select what's necessary for your taste. Cheers, Sebastian -- srasher http://www.zeroed.net - Ruhrpott Thrash/Death http://www.last.fm/user/srasher ------------------------------------------------------------------------ srasher's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6209 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32487 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
