Using a NAS drive at home vs. DJing

[DJ Sunshine]

So I'm about to build a custom gaming/production PC and am looking at adding an 4-8 TB RAIDed NAS drive for backups and file serving. I'd like to keep all my music and video files on it so that I have access to them on my Apple TV/iPhone/desktop PC/MacBook and then I want the music files to be available when I need to take my MB to a gig. Will I run into any difficulties with this when using a NAS drive? Should I just keep my DJ library separate and then copy it to the NAS drive for my home personal use? Anyone running a NAS drive for their home and have any pro's and con's with their DJ setup?

[tokenasianguy]

So I'm about to build a custom gaming/production PC and am looking at adding an 4-8 TB RAIDed NAS drive for backups and file serving. I'd like to keep all my music and video files on it so that I have access to them on my Apple TV/iPhone/desktop PC/MacBook and then I want the music files to be available when I need to take my MB to a gig. Will I run into any difficulties with this when using a NAS drive? Should I just keep my DJ library separate and then copy it to the NAS drive for my home personal use? Anyone running a NAS drive for their home and have any pro's and con's with their DJ setup?

How will your music files be available for you to gig with if it's on your NAS drive?

I think even if you're at home and your music is in NAS, you might have issues streaming your music through wifi and intro Traktor. There would probably be some latency.

[Steve Zorilow]

There's no real problem with NAS & DJ Setup as long as your network can follow. The faster your Router & Ethernet card are, the better. I've never had any problem with this here even for Vidéo streaming.

However, like tokenasianguy said, for your gig it's not going to be really useful... I would use a external Firewire/eSata HDD instead OR put the whole collection in your MBP and sync it with the NAS before/after your gigs.

[smiTTTen]

I use my NAS at home. Takes a little longer to load tracks but nothing too painful. I use Synchronicity to make a local copy of my tracks as and when I need them. Let's say you are on the road for a while and add tracks to folder on your laptop that you copied down from the NAS. well Synchronicity will then copy any new tracks back to the NAS when you synch back up.

[tokenasianguy]

IMO, I would never use an external hard drive to play out. I did that once, and nudged my hard drive just slightly, all of a sudden it let out this loud, griding, white-noise type of sound. The only way to rectify it was to totally shut down Traktor.

Nothing is as secure as having the music directly in the laptop's hard drive.

[Steve Zorilow]

I use external HDD since day 1, no problem with it. I even have a backup one just for fun! Oh yeah and the Backup one also have an image of the OS drive. In case the internal one fail... I boot from the external one and voilà!

[padi_04]

I think even if you're at home and your music is in NAS, you might have issues streaming your music through wifi and intro Traktor. There would probably be some latency.

When you load a track to a deck it stores it in the machine's RAM, it's not reading from the source in realtime. Only issue is load times will increase a bit.

[DJ Sunshine]

This is exactly why I want to see if this is the right step. I want to have a local copy on my DJ laptop and then have it available to listen to for home use on a NAS drive as well. I don't want to manually have to sync up the two libraries, hence why I'm hesitant. How do you like using this software smitten? I'd never play out using a spotty club network connection, HDD all the way.