First NAS

steveo · 27 Aug 2012 at 19:29

wow so many choices to pick from were the hell do first timers start, am wanting to put 3 2TB hard drives which i have in some external hard drives (WD Elements) in to the NAS along with another 2TB so 8TB in total, the media i have on the Drives is for a plex server which is been run on the iMac the media is then sent to a mac mini running the client, have been looking at at QNAP TS-412, Synology DS411j and a Netgear ReadyNas NV+ 4.

Now i dont no the first thing about NAS's so would really like your input on this. i have all my macs connected to a TP-Link Gigabit switch so would it be wise connecting the NAS to that or straight to the Mini

hope that makes sense

i put this in the mac section as they are the machines i would be using with the NAS

DIABLO · 28 Aug 2012 at 21:54

You would get a better response in the Internet section. I personnally would get a HP Microserver as it's the cheapest/best performing/most flexable solution (big thread in server section) the one downside is that it's not plug and play like a NAS. You would connect the NAS or whatever to your router.

memyselfandi · 28 Aug 2012 at 22:02

The chances are any of the NASes you list should do what you want, (personally I'm using a couple of QNAP NASes with Mac Mini's and Plex), or even the Microserver which Diablo mentions, although this would require more setting up.

But be aware that Plex can have issues with picking up new media on network drives (deep scan works fine but quick scan can miss stuff due to OSX not updating directory timestamps properly on network drives).

steveo · 28 Aug 2012 at 22:38

cheers guys i have been looking in to a microserver, my 1 concern is that the hard drives i have all have media on them and am not sure i would need to format them when there been set up in the nas/microserver

memyselfandi · 29 Aug 2012 at 06:57

With a NAS, then probably yes you would need to format them. Most if not all NASes are running some form of Linux variant under the cover so will want their internal disks to be configured as ext3/ext4 on top of md software raid which means they'll need to be formatted to be set up.

The micro server will depend on what OS you are using and how you decide to configure it.