Unfortunately, I agree 100% with JJZolx. I was faced with this same frustration, and I finally went nuclear to take care of the problem.
I purchased a fanless nano-ITX machine (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Systems/Damn_Small_Machine) from the Damn Small Linux store. It is about the size of a Mac Mini. It came with a Gigabyte of IDE flash, so it has no moving parts at all. I installed Michael's SlimCD (http://www.herger.net/slim/detail.php?nr=763.) I then made considerable changes to SlimCD to get it in the form that I thought was necessary to make it a permanent fixture as a music server. I purchased a refurbished Seagate Freeagent Pro 750 GByte USB 2.0 HDD to hold my music collection. It is extremely quiet, very small, and works nicely now that it is reformatted with an ext2 file system. I like this stand-alone drive very much and highly recommend it. I have a second 750 GByte drive that is used for backup, and that one is usually NOT online. I have about 300 Gbytes in my music collection at this point. I don't believe in the NAS solution - too slow, too noisy, too expensive, not reliable, still requires a backup device, etc. I don't like the concept. It only makes sense to me if it is necessary to keep things going during a drive failure - without a glitch. I don't need that:) I think a single drive, that is kept backed up, is quite sufficient, cheaper, and requires less hardware. I looked long and hard at the ReadyNAS product before turning my back on the entire concept. When I began this project, I knew next to nothing about Linux, and now I know just enough to be dangerous. Because of the embarassing lack of knowledge I had when I began, it took me a long time to arrive at the finish line. My server running Slimserver is simple, very small, very responsive, silent enough to keep anywhere, headless, easily upgraded, and reliable (it is also plugged into a small dedicated UPS.) It is not terribly expensive - but I did not do it for anything close to $200. It took a lot of work before I felt that I was done, and the average person is not going to be interested in doing any of this. At this point, I have installed three more SB3s for friends and family. For these installations, Slimserver was installed on different platforms, (one had to be put on a laptop,) that are all used very heavily for other purposes and family uses. This is problematic. If a very small box running Slimserver, say the size of a Netgear wireless router, could be managed at $200 to $300 - it would be killer. Maybe something like the new Pico-ITX board could be a candidate for such a machine. I am going to procure one of these myself and try this at some point. -Ron -- Ron F. *Squeezebox setup:* wireless SB3 -> CI Audio VDA.2 DAC + VAC.1 PSU *Main rig:* NAD 7600 + NAD 2600A -> Phase Tech PC-6.5 speakers *Headphone rig:* Headroom Max -> Sennheiser 650s *Music Server:* Nano-ITX computer running SlimCD + 750 GByte HDD -> Netgear wireless router *Other stuff:* NAD C542 CDP, NAD 6300 Tape, Monster 5100 Power conditioner, Outlaw Audio cables ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ron F.'s Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5616 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=36385 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
