NAS advice

[bluemoon222]

I am looking to move all of my digital libraries to a NAS....at the moment all of our photos and music and movies comfortably sits on a 4TB RAID in my 6 year old MacPro (10.7.5)

We extensively use SONOS for music and sometimes use Plex for movies and we share to an Apple TV in the lounge

Since this machine is effectively the "master" it is also where we sync and back up our 2 iPads, 2 iPods and my iPhone.

It has:

1 x 120 GB SSD Boot
2 x SATA 2TB in a RAID array
1 x 160GB SATA

Back up is to local USB drive using Timemachine and a Superduper image of the SSD boot drive where the apps reside to the local 160GB SATA

It runs well but remote access to iPhoto Libraries would be nice as well as taking this extra radiator out of my office !

Am thinking to tidy my home office by:

1. Add NAS to network (will go in cupboard under stairs where other equipment sits)
2. Acquire laptop (likely a Macbook Air)
3. Sell the Pro

Questions:

1. Others doing this and good or bad experiences ?
2. Backup when I move - am thinking to buy a 4 BAY NAS (Synology ?) and put 2 x 4TB RAID arrays in stripe between them...does that work ?

 

[cptkrf]

Mark my experiences with NAS as bad. I have tried a Lacie and a WD, although not in RAID configuration. Got so mad at them that I ripped them apart to salvage the hard drives for use in an ordinary USB case.

I have settled on exactly what you are trying to get away from. An old Mac mini on the shelf, with a 2tb and at 3tb drive on the USB ports, and shared to everything in the house. It is on a separate internal network with no connection to the Internet so I don't have security problems to fool with.

For an internal Dropbox clone for quick and temporary sharing, I connected a 1tb laptop drive to my Airport Extreme. That works better than Airdrop to move big stuff between the Macs.

Built a NAS out of a Raspberry PI and an external drive, but it wasn't satisfactory either, although it didn't corrupt or just flat lose my data like the commercial ones. It was just slow.

I would like a nice NAS, sitting in the corner and forgotten, but it hasn't happened yet, unless I call the old Mini a NAS. It is working fine, if not exactly plug and play.

 

[Slydude]

I have had bad experiences with two different NAS devices as well. I am debating whether to try another one or do something similar to what you are doing though I don't have a spare Mac at the moment.

 

[bluemoon222]

Thanks for the replies......any chance to say what the issues were that meant you moved away from this set up ?

 

[Slydude]

In the first case the drive failed shortly within months after I bought it. Trying to get into the case was akin to breaking into Fort Knox. By the time I realized that recovery was pretty much out of the question the warranty had expired.

In the case of the IOMEGA device I accidentally started a copy operation involving more than 100 MP4 clips from one folder to the iTunes Media folder. I had intended to move aliases of the files instead. The copy process would not cancel. I think I lost poer somewhere in the equation. At any rate the drive was so full and so corrupted that I could not mount the media folder to fix the problem. Managed to remove the drive but Data Rescue was not able to ressurect all of the files.

At the moment I have my media drive video clips, iTunes library etc. on an external drive attached to my Time Capsule. If the Time Capsule dies I can use the drive as is or connect it to something else. I can also disconnect the drive from theTime Capsule, connect it to a Mac and run disk utility software as needed.

BTW I think some of the Buffalo NAS devices allow you to swap in your own drives should one of them fail.

 

[bluemoon222]

Thanks.....I am looking at QNAP and Synology and have heard some great reviews of both. They both support RAID disc mirroring and allow easy removal and insertion of SATA drives for upgrade / maintenance so I do not believe that should be an issue.

What I am mainly trying to figure out are any software / application issues with the likes of:

iPhoto
iTunes
Plex
Sonos

that I might bump into

 

[ankhseeker]

I use a Buffalo station that is plugged into my switch. I use "Connect to server" to access it. It has been flawless in the storage of files for my network. The newer ones can accept TM backups as well.

 

[bluemoon222]

Thanks....that would be for remote content access from Finder eg but what about any apps....do you run eg iTunes or iPhoto from the NAS ?

 

[Jaybird180]

NAS- Some love them, some hate them.

I have a Synology. The iTunes server built-in is a joke (search around the Synology forums).
For what I bought it for, it serves my needs and I feel pretty confident in it. I've had it a year, next month. Unfortunately, they came out with the 4-bay version of what I bought shortly after- but I couldn't wait.

I currently have my iMac running TimeMachine backups to it. I moved all my data there from migrating to Windows. I plan to keep it as my primary data storage location and as I get more comfortable with my Mac, that's what I plan to do....AFTER I get one issue resolved that I just haven't put the time into configuring - I'm ashamed to say, so I won't.

Maybe - just maybe - in a couple years, I will migrate to the 4-bay unit as my needs grow (ie run out of space, I'm only running 3TB in mirror configuration).