Airport Extreme Or My Book World Edition

Right, I have just bought an Apple TV and think it's great, I have set up the system so that anything unwatched is stored on the Apple TV, once it's watched it will delete from the Apple TV and just stay on the Macbook, if I want to watch it again I simply stream from the Macbook or wait a couple of minutes whilst it copies onto the Apple TV HDD. I know this might not be everyone's ideal way of doing this but it really works for me!!

So here's where I am now...

I am running out of space on my Macbook and so need to think of how I will go about storing everything, I have looked into a couple of options but want some opinions on what people think...

Either... Buy an Airport Extreme Base Station and attach a portable HDD (1TB) so I can get my Macbook to put sync everything to there as a NAS system. I can then, if I want take the HDD off the ase Station if I want too if I'm going away. Average Cost £140 for base station and £80 for portable 1TB HDD.

Or... Don't bother with the Airport Extreme and simply buy a WD My Book World edition and plug it into the Router I currently have, It's harder to take it with me as the size and set up is a lot bigger, however the My Book has an additional USB on the rear to add more storage if I wanted something portable. Average Cost £119 for My Book World Edition 1TB

I know the costs can be found elsewhere, I was just using the first example I found on price to give a guidance on the difference.

Has anyone had experience with either set up and what would you recommend?

Cheers

cwaddell2002 said:

I used to keep my media on an external attached to my MBP - it worked well, unless I bought something from itunes when my external drive wasn't connected, which became quite frustrating - so much so that I found another solution. I looked at the NAS option, but it will require you to have your mac on whenever you are streaming to your atv, and it will double your network congestion, as everything will go to your mac and then to the atv. If thats ok with you - then it is cheaper than what I am about to suggest:

I took an old mini (g4), and made it an itunes server. It resides in a closet with a 500gb external raid 5 enclosure. Itunes runs all the time on it, and it is set to use the home sharing feature to automatically copy new content off my MPB. This machine is the primary sync to the ATV and never sleeps, so the content is always available to the ATV. If my MBP starts to get a little full, i just delete content I don't want anymore, after assuring that it copied to the mini. this way, I keep my laptops hard drive relatively clear.

If I am away, and really really need and or want some content that is at home, I use the mobile me back to my mac to remotely mount the hard drive and stream the content - which works fine with audio, video not so much...

I hope this helps, good luck!

Click to expand...

That sounds a really good solution, however the cost of those Mac Mini's are quite a fair amount, even for the older ones and that's the only concern that I have with that.

What about the NAS systems that have Bonjour and iTunes capabilities, does that do the same thing? Or am I just going up the garden path with that idea?

I see what you mean about the congestion, both the HDD and Apple TV would be connected via Ethernet, however the Macbook would be wireless, it seems sill that the content has to go to the Macbook first.