New external storage for iMac?

washo

washo

washo

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Joined
22 Jun 2009
Posts
140
Hi All,

I have ordered the new iMac and want to hook it up to a NAS for storage and backups when it arrives. The iMac is the top end 27".

I currently use a Synology Ds411j NAS with RAID and have only had it a year or so. Do you think this is good enough or think it is time to upgrade?

New to Macs so not sure. I appreciate the NAS only uses USB2 currently but seems a waste to replace it.

Any friendly advice would be appreciated. Thanks
 
washo said:
I currently use a Synology Ds411j NAS with RAID and have only had it a year or so. Do you think this is good enough or think it is time to upgrade?

New to Macs so not sure. I appreciate the NAS only uses USB2 currently but seems a waste to replace it.
Click to expand...

The Synology will be able to handle Time Machine or any other type of backup you want to employ.

The NAS has a gigabit port so you don't need to connect it via USB to your iMac.
 
Thanks guys. Shows how often I have used it! It is using the gigabit port via the router but still seems quite slow with Win7.

Is Time Machine easy to setup? Am I right in saying hdd need to be reformatted to fat instead of ntfs?
 
washo said:
Is Time Machine easy to setup? Am I right in saying hdd need to be reformatted to fat instead of ntfs?
Click to expand...

I think I formatted mine to use exFAT so it can be used by both Windows and OSX hosts. If I remember I'll check when I get home.
 
afaik if you are running it as a NAS rather than as a USB device the filesystem doesn't matter as it will be exposing files over CIFS/AFP/SMB.
 
uchuff said:
afaik if you are running it as a NAS rather than as a USB device the filesystem doesn't matter as it will be exposing files over CIFS/AFP/SMB.
Click to expand...

That is correct - I enabled Bonjour in the network settings to get it to work. It was my portable drive that I formatted to exFAT.
 
Thanks for feedback. That's a relief as it took about 3 days before to format the drives!

Looking forward to entering the MAC world.
 
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