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iTunes, Apple TV and network storage?

D

Drecca

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 30, 2010
264
116
About a year ago I started attaching an external hard drive to the apple AirPort Extreme and shared it with my laptop. I used the drive for my iTunes library.

The I/o was so bad that iTunes literally kept crashing when importing shows or movies. I went with a plex setup and it works fine but I prefer using an Apple TV and not a roku.

In the meantime, I moved my music over to my Dropbox folder. So I can listen to it anywhere. It's definitely not big enough for my tv stuff though.

So with the newest version of iTunes, is the network storage stuff fixed? Do I need to move my music back to network storage or can I leave it in Dropbox?

Thanks for the help!!
 
My configuration

I use the following configuration for two TVs:
- MacMini (Mid 2010, 4GB RAM) with iTunes (for ATV) and XBMC for the TV directly linked to MacMini;
- QNAP TS-412 with 4x3TB disks in RAID 6;
- AppleTV 2 upstairs connected to the MacMini via Airport Extreme last generation (it works excellent with 720p movies).
All the movies are in .m4v format (using iFlicks) and all the music is in .m4a format (using XLD).
I've been using this configuration for the last two years without any problem. The only nuisance is the random movies artwork disappearance in iTunes.
 
I used a 2TB Airport Time Capsule as a network drive for my iTunes library on my MacBook Air for a couple months. With the 802.11ac wifi on the MBA I got about 30MB/s and almost 50MB/s when connected via a USB gigabit ethernet adapter. I have read that hard drives connected to the USB port on the Airport Extreme are very slow, maybe that is part of the problem?

However, if anything happened that caused me to lose the connection to the network drive, then I had problems. Ended up with some corruption in the iTunes library that I had to fix. So I had to be careful to quit iTunes and dismount the network drive when doing various things, and that got to be sort of a pain.

So I just setup a new Mac Mini on gigabit ethernet with directly attached 3TB USB3 drives and I leave it running iTunes all the time. This is a much nicer setup and I don't have to worry about problems if I lose the network connection on my MBA. And of course I can watch my movies anytime on the AppleTV without needing to run iTunes on my MBA. The Apple TV is also much more responsive now without the network drive bottleneck. I have it connected by gigabit ethernet, and the USB3 hard drives on the Mini clock at around 170MB/s so they are capable of saturating the ethernet connection.
 
Drecca said:
About a year ago I started attaching an external hard drive to the apple AirPort Extreme and shared it with my laptop. I used the drive for my iTunes library.

The I/o was so bad that iTunes literally kept crashing when importing shows or movies. I went with a plex setup and it works fine but I prefer using an Apple TV and not a roku.

In the meantime, I moved my music over to my Dropbox folder. So I can listen to it anywhere. It's definitely not big enough for my tv stuff though.

So with the newest version of iTunes, is the network storage stuff fixed? Do I need to move my music back to network storage or can I leave it in Dropbox?

Thanks for the help!!
Click to expand...
I've had this same setup for over a year now. AEBS with attached HDD and aTV in basement. MBP running iTunes on 1st floor, so it's all wifi, and the setup has not been problematic.
 
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