Turning an old pc into a DAS

[4ce_Games]

I am wanting to turn an old computer of mine into a das, not a nas. I am a musician, and am wanting to expand my studio in a way that requires me to have both a windows and mac pcs. Because of that I am wanting to have a das hold all my projects and the two computers open the projects from it. I am not wanting a nas as I don't want to have to deal with any possible network issues that may arise while workings.

[Alex Atkin UK]

5 minutes ago, 4ce_Games said:

I am wanting to turn an old computer of mine into a das, not a nas. I am a musician, and am wanting to expand my studio in a way that requires me to have both a windows and mac pcs. Because of that I am wanting to have a das hold all my projects and the two computers open the projects from it. I am not wanting a nas as I don't want to have to deal with any possible network issues that may arise while workings.

But the nature of a DAS is its only connected to one computer at a time, so how will that work?  You planning to manually swap it between machines?

[4ce_Games]

7 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

But the nature of a DAS is its only connected to one computer at a time, so how will that work?  You planning to manually swap it between machines?

Really, I didn't know that. Is there any other options to do wired storage, or is a NAS the only real good option?

[Nicckko]

11 minutes ago, 4ce_Games said:

Is there any other options to do wired storage, or is a NAS the only real good option?

If you want wired storage that can go between machines easily, your best bet would be an external hard drive or ssd. The ones I would recommend would be the Samsung SSD T7 or the Seagate Portable Hard Drive. Both can be found on Amazon. I highly suggest going with a NAS since there is no unplugging needed. If you want to make it simple and you have some programming knowledge, configuring a raspberry pi as a NAS is a great idea.

If you do go with the Pi NAS, you might opt for a Pi clone since genuine raspberry pi's can get expensive. Linus made a great video showing different clone pi's and their pros and cons. For Pi NAS software, I've always went with OpenMediaVault because of its customization but the choice is yours. Good luck and let me know if you need any more help!

[Alex Atkin UK]

4 minutes ago, Nicckko said:

If you want wired storage that can go between machines easily, your best bet would be an external hard drive or ssd. The ones I would recommend would be the Samsung SSD T7 or the Seagate Portable Hard Drive. Both can be found on Amazon. I highly suggest going with a NAS since there is no unplugging needed. If you want to make it simple and you have some programming knowledge, configuring a raspberry pi as a NAS is a great idea.

If you do go with the Pi NAS, you might opt for a Pi clone since genuine raspberry pi's can get expensive. Linus made a great video showing different clone pi's and their pros and cons. For Pi NAS software, I've always went with OpenMediaVault because of its customization but the choice is yours. Good luck and let me know if you need any more help!

Would a Pi NAS be fast enough for this usage though?  I'd be wanting to shove as much CPU power as possible behind a NAS being used for production.

I have an i5 12400 in my server and it was a notable increase in performance over an i5 8600K, especially if you have any SSD storage.  IO operations can be quite a CPU hit on a NAS, fine for say Plex where you're just streaming large files, but audio production surely involves a lot of smaller files open at the same time.

[Nicckko]

Just now, Alex Atkin UK said:

I'd be wanting to shove as much CPU power as possible behind a NAS being used for production.

I've only ever used a Pi NAS as a replacement for Dropbox if that makes sense. If you are trying to run the files directly off the NAS in real time, there might be some slowdowns but for the most part, your internet bandwidth probably plays a bigger role. Also if possible, try to use ethernet for a NAS (especially a Pi NAS)!

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 minute ago, Nicckko said:

I've only ever used a Pi NAS as a replacement for Dropbox if that makes sense. If you are trying to run the files directly off the NAS in real time, there might be some slowdowns but for the most part, your internet bandwidth probably plays a bigger role. Also if possible, try to use ethernet for a NAS (especially a Pi NAS)!

Internet bandwidth has no bearing on a NAS unless, as you're presumably doing, are accessing it from the Internet.

 

If you're accessing many files at the same time off a NAS, even your choice of NIC can be relevant as many only use a single CPU core for network operations, better NICs use more cores.

[Nicckko]

1 minute ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Internet bandwidth has no bearing on a NAS unless, as you're presumably doing, are accessing it from the Internet.

If for example your NAS is not connected to any ethernet but instead it was connected to spotty wifi with speeds dipping, it could definitely slow down your NAS. It is less about the speed and more about the ping. I probably should have stated that earlier.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Would a Pi NAS be fast enough for this usage though?  I'd be wanting to shove as much CPU power as possible behind a NAS being used for production.

I have an i5 12400 in my server and it was a notable increase in performance over an i5 8600K, especially if you have any SSD storage.  IO operations can be quite a CPU hit on a NAS, fine for say Plex where you're just streaming large files, but audio production surely involves a lot of smaller files open at the same time.

Can you explin more about your workload where the 8600k -> 12400 had a performance bump as a nas? From what I've seen the cpu doesn't matter much in a nas untill your working with pretty crazy(for a home setup) network and storage setups.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, Nicckko said:

If for example your NAS is not connected to any ethernet but instead it was connected to spotty wifi with speeds dipping, it could definitely slow down your NAS. It is less about the speed and more about the ping. I probably should have stated that earlier.

Wifi isn’t internet, that is still LAN. 
 

Wifi does have some latency, and I would never recommend running a NAS on Wifi, but it’s all still internal networking, and honestly, especially if Wifi 6, probably fine for most home users anyways. 

[Nicckko]

1 hour ago, LIGISTX said:

Wifi does have some latency, and I would never recommend running a NAS on Wifi, but it’s all still internal networking, and honestly, especially if Wifi 6, probably fine for most home users anyways. 

I was just speaking out of experience prior to when I had access to ethernet. Running a NAS on Wifi will always cause more latency than using ethernet.

 

I may or may not have written my post right after I woke up so ignore my mistake about wifi being the same as internet. My wording got a bit messed up lmao.

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Can you explin more about your workload where the 8600k -> 12400 had a performance bump as a nas? From what I've seen the cpu doesn't matter much in a nas untill your working with pretty crazy(for a home setup) network and storage setups.

Definitely not a typical home setup no:

 

All my storage is on there and when moving around lots of small files then NIC interrupts can bog things down.  Although for my setup it was directories with a metric load of pictures that are thumbnailed in real-time to a RAM disk to save on storage space for the thumbnail cache.

 

The point is the OP wants to do audio production with the data in a central location, this is definitely way outside of a typical home setup and you want good NICs and plenty of CPU power and RAM in the NAS to minimise IO bottlenecks.