Auralic Aries vs Aurender X100 vs Melco N1Z

[PhilP]

If an HDD fails in an Aurender what's the procedure for replacing it?  Is this something that a consumer can do (including restoring from back-up) or does it have to go back to a dealer/manufacturer?  I would much prefer to have an external an HDD or SDD.

Thanks.

EDIT: I read in the Aurender manual that it is possible to play music from an external HDD or even a NAS which is great! I couldn't see any mention of the possibility to swap the internal HDD or how to back it up?

EDIT2: FWIW, I just read on Computeraudiophile that it is physically possible for a user to replace a failed HDD (though the effects of this on the warranty aren't clear) but that the disk then has to be reformatted. Apparently this can be done remotely by the Aurender support team (great ) or by a dealer who has special s/w to do it.

"Aurender music servers don't have any built-in disk redundancy. This means when a hard drive fails and is subsequently replaced, the music must be copied back to the unit." Apparently its fairly straightforward to configure a NAS to make the backups making the Aurender discs look like local folders. There's no need to put any s/w on the Aurender itself to make backups. The main downside is that according to the manual it can take 5-6 hrs to copy 1TB of music to the Aurender - still, hopefully it shouldn't be necessary to do this too often

Overall these solutions seems pretty good! Now, if only it could stream Qobuz....


EDIT 3: Computeraudiophile also commented that "The X100L is a great buy, but it's not as good as the W20 even when only considering the USB output. The final sound quality also depends on the DAC used. Some DACs like the Ayre QB-9 DSD may perform identically connected via USB to either Aurender model because it's completely immune to power signals from the server." Too bad it costs so much.