Nas or external hard rive - budget £350

Marlie

Marlie

Marlie

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Joined
8 Mar 2010
Posts
164
Hi guys,

Currently got a macbook pro 2013, Apple Tv and I pad.

What do you think would be best set up to run all my media? Ive currently got 2 1tb externals but always a bit of hassle having to plug them in to the macbook.

Just looking for something that I can access my iTunes/movies/photos quickly.I am also on virgin fibre optic with a Superhub 2.
 
NAS, once it is set up, it is so much more convenient.

£350 can get you something like a 2 bay NAS and couple of 3TB drives,
 
get yourself a zyxel nas for about 65 quid and then a couple of decent sized drives to put in it. Cost you about 150 odd and save 200 quid.
 
What are the better NAS 'brands' out there?

Wait... let me rephrase that... What are the better NAS 'brands' out there for a reasonable price?
 
Cheers for that... I have been looking at synology and drobo (although the latter is right out of my price range realistically!)
 
I have an N54L Microsever running Nas4Free. It was* £80 after cashback, not sure if that's still going but, throw in some drives, install Nas4Free on a USB stick and jobs a goodun.
 
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I've several QNAP NASes which have been pretty reasonable(*) but would be happy to buy Synology as well.

(*) note there are issues with OSX Mavericks and SMB2 which can be very irritating
 
Thread revival...

I'm not thick, honestly - but am I able to store all my iTunes media on a NAS drive and the. Utilise Apple TV and stream to it?

Likewise streaming to my macbook?

I'm going from an iMac with a huge internal / external drive combo to a macbook with 256gb...

Any ideas?
 
Just out of curiosity for those that have the iTunes media library on the NAS.... What do you do when you take your MBP out of the house? As I understand you won't have any music as the MBP can't be configured like an iPad/iPhone to have a playlist if you like that is synced.
 
What I'd like to know is what people do for redundancy with their NAS? Does anybody mirror the drive or not bother?
 
Karl said:
What I'd like to know is what people do for redundancy with their NAS? Does anybody mirror the drive or not bother?
Click to expand...

Important files and documents get backed up to DVD. Everything else is just media from CDs and DVDs I have hard copies of. So if there was a catastrophic failure, while it would be a PITA to re-rip and re-edit tags and ID3 on everything, nothing of value is lost.
 
Karl said:
What I'd like to know is what people do for redundancy with their NAS? Does anybody mirror the drive or not bother?
Click to expand...

I have RAID mirroring internally (only coz I can really) and have a USB drive connected to the rear of the NAS using realtime replication of the internal drive - so even in the unlikely event of the RAID array failing* I have a ready to use version on NTFS without any faffing about recovering the RAID volume. Its only a slight performance/transfer rate (write) penalty. Then I've got the USB copy front port setup to take "snapshots" on another drive, done manually at regular intervals, as an extra level of protection i.e. just incase a PC connected to a share with write access happened to get infected with one of those malwares that encrypt files and hold them to ransom.

Thats not taking into account any off site backup, etc.



* In my experience theres about an even chance of an entire array failure as there is a single disc failure :S so I rarely rely on RAID alone for backup purposes only runtime failover convenience and/or performance.
 
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I use a Drobo 5N. Whilst they are little on the expensive side, they are fantastic. Use it for my iTunes Library, Time Machine and my Windows PC connects to it for my data on there.
Just love the ability to use different size drives and to be able to upgrade them to larger drives when your running low on space.
 
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