by GJ51 » Tue Jun 26, 2012 10:14 pm
It may very well have enough power for music, but it's hard to tell from the spec sheet. It's using a 2 GHz CPU, but it doesn't say what kind. 512MB of ram is probably OK, but you still have to remember that this hardware is designed to handle the load of the NAS, it's not really designed for hosting a server. Most companies (think HP for the best example) usually only put in the hardware they need to run a device like this without a lot of extra capacity built in.
There's no doubt that units like this can be hacked to do additional things, but ask yourself; if you were running a company competing in the NAS market, would you put more hardware into a retail unit than it needed to do the function it was designed for? There's no free lunch here, if you put more stuff into the NAS for it to run, it's taking that horsepower from something else that it was designed to do. There are a lot of possibilities and I'm sure there are others who would totally disagree with me, but you have a problem to solve. So what's the best approach? You have some options. You can continue to try getting it to work on the NAS. I don't give that much of a chance for success, but it is possible if you hit on just the right things that need to be done. Second, you could reformat all of you music to MP3 so that there isn't any transcoding needed. This can be pretty time consuming depending on what kind of resources you have. Or, third you can just move Subsonic onto a platform that can do the job more easily.
I've put SS on just about everything but a NAS to test the limitations of what different platforms can and can't do when I was trying to get better results with video. From atom powered netbooks to old laptops to dual quad core Xeon servers, I've pushed the limits on all of them to see the impact hardware has on each SS function. Unfortunately, I never tried the NAS option as I don't have one. On all the other platforms. running windows, I was always able to get just about everything working without too much trouble, including the files you sent.
So, that's about it. At some point you'll have to decide what's the best route for you to get SS hosting your library.
HTH
Gary J
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