It only protects you against disk failure, and it is mostly used to make sure the data is still available as you change disks. Not for long term data protection. Overall, a RAID NAS is probably not that safer than a standard external hard drive. RAID is mostly there to make sure that you can benefit from high performance, high capacity and networking without sacrificing reliability.
If you have two disks and availability is not a problem (you can afford not to listen to music as you restore from backup), you are better off with an external hard drive used only for backup/restore operation and kept somewhere safe when not in use.
Licensing deals are stupid. Also I do see smaller artists on Google Play Music being lumped together with half a dozen other smaller artists. I cant believe how broken that is and sometimes the artists songs I am looking for doesnt show up cause they dont even show albums featuring that artist in their album listing.
But 128GB phones have enough storage for most music collections
for line breaks on HN.
The lack of an SD card slot is a dealbreaker in a phone for me, regardless of price.
That's too small for my collection! (I use a 64 gig card for taking my music on the road alone). My music collection is stored on a 1Tb drive.
Collections are not static. I discover new music every once in a while. Syncing with cloud makes sense; it is just that you could be the owner of the hardware behind the cloud, to maintain privacy or you encrypt the data in the cloud (or both, and use one cloud as backup).
You could use rsync or something with a flash drive though. Android smartphones will happily eat microSD cards containing hundreds of GB of music.
Which means the iPod Classic 160 GB is finally obsolete. However I think you can hack those devices anyway, to put in a new 2.5" SATA SSD (if they eat SATA).