Sonos and NAS system

Hi all

I will try and keep this as short as possible and I would appreciate answers that are easy to understand as technical stuff is not my forte .

I have just bought 2 play 5 Sonos units and a bridge so these music players can stream music on there mesh/wireless network.

Units were simple to set up and sound really great,but what I hate about them is the fact I have to have the apple iMac on all the time for these to work.

I do have a Iomega 500 gig external hardrive and someone on another form suggested I put the iTunes folder/ music on there and then I would not have to keep switching iMac on even though its connected to the iMac through USB? Is this correct ?

I am also hearing good reports about these NAS units that connect through your router and are great for file sharing and Sonos.

I thought buying a synology unit around £160 from dabs would solve my problem,but when looking at the specs I noticed no international storage but 8 tb capacity,so am I right in thinking I have to also buy drives for the synology system as I'm totally confused.

Anyone got a simple solution given the equipment I have or other means to get this Sonos playing without the need to keep turning the iMac on/off constantly.

I know it may be a small issue but I don't want to have to do this.

Thanks in advance for any help....keep it simple though as I find some of this totally confusing and hard to understand .

Just had a quick look at it and yes you would need to purchase HDD's for it. You can get some NAS's that already have HDD's in them such as Western Digital or Buffalo which may work out a bit cheaper...

As far as I'm aware, the only other solution is to store your music on your iPhone and stream from there to the Sonos, but I'm not too sure how that will work or setup a Spotify Premium account and stream through Spotify .

Im hearing great things about these synology units and not so good reports about the ones you mention and especially netgear.

Synology and Qnap are probably the best home based NAS units around. When selecting a NAS, make sure you check that it supports iTunes Server (Synology & Qnap definitely do).

I have a 4 bay QNAP which works quite nicely (but is a bit pricey)...
I just picked out a couple if NAS's that already have HDD'S in but have no idea if they are any good, I'd imagine they have limited functionality

Ws thinking of getting one of these but what else do i need in terms of hard drive for this unit.

As you can see it says storage Nil but capacity 8TB ,I'm glad i looked at the details as i thought this box was all i needed not knowing anything about these Nas products and technical stuff in the first place.

Im one of them people that buys something that is fully functional and working with little need for upgrades or making Raid Partitions and stuff,the only thing i have added to this iMac is a Iomega 500g external hard drive that is virtually full and plugs into the back of the iMac using usb.

I would have gone for the above item but i guess adding hard drive to this is going to double the price if not more,thinking of just buying a bigger hard drive or something.

Where do you buy your stuff from,when i was searching for NAS Units Google pointed me in the direction of Dabs Online,obviously there are many other broadband stores besides Dabs.

I used to use a great one many years ago but forgot what it was called having not needed to buy that much online regarding upgrades and when i generally want something PC orientated i just pop to PC world.

Anyone have any suggestions and links for the items i require please
post the links on here and i will be more than glad to take a look,seems these synology units are not something PC World sells and they dont seem to have a massive choice there..

At the end of the day all i want is to run SONOS without the need of turning the Imac on and off all the time,so i am thinking of buying a bigger external hard drive unit and i was told that i could run the Sonos from there without the need of having the imac on........Is that correct ?

Edited by time2die (Sun 12-May-13 14:29:45)

I generally use the cheapest place, but my usual go to places are eBuyer, Amazon, Overclockers, Dabs, Novatech and Currys/PCWorld.

Just buying an external HDD won't do you any good as you'll need to plug it i to something - usually your computer, however some routers now have built in USB ports that you can plug a USB HDD into and that'll work as a basic NAS.

If you do go for the Synology, my bet is that you will need to purchase SATA drives to fit in there, but you would need to check their support site for any compatibility issues...

Ok mate thanks for all your help,I'm sure I could use a external drive without the need to use a router to play the sonos,I have read on the sonos forums this is what some of them do without the need of having PC / Mac on all the time.

Any of the drives on this page will work. If you don't want to set up a RAID array, just buy a single large drive initially. You can always add a second drive at a later date. Alternatively, you can buy 2 drives and set them up as a mirrored pair, so that the data on one disk is duplicated on the second disk.