Storage Ceiling on iTunes Content; NAS Solution? iTunes Server Component?

I've got 2 upgraded Mac Minis with 750 GB hard drives sharing content for the home right now. One Mini is hosting music and apps and the other, TV and movies. We combined those with 6 of the new Apple TVs, 4 Airport Expresses, 1 Airport Extreme to host and a few iPhones and iPods to control things with.

Problem is, I've just about maxed out the HD space on both and there aren't very many options on where to go from here.

Switching over to an iMac (for iTunes hosting alone) is a huge waste of resources, electricity and a big pretty screen. Further, we've already got an iMac and a Mac Pro. Those machines are dedicated for work and play and I don't want to use them to host gobs of data. Buying another Mac Pro is absurd and forget the notebooks.

What is left in Apple's product line for us to use? Yet another Mac Mini to spread data around? Then we need to connect to the correct library just to fish out content that should be accessible in one place.

Suffice it to say, there doesn't seem to be any Apple products that fit this bill and that seems like a somewhat glaring omission in the product mix. Why isn't there an "Apple Media Server" or something like that - easily connect with an iPad or similar and add content via iTunes, network or USB transport.

I know there are other options like building a noisy small form factor PC shell stuffed with a few HDs. But again, even that seems like a waste of resources.

What about using a NAS with an iTunes server? I've been looking at the Synology NAS DS410 kit:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108050

According to the Synology website, this NAS kit does support iTunes server. Anyone have any experience setting things up this way? Does it stream well? Is it easy to browse and buy new content? Can I, for example, log onto the Synology NAS system and buy content off the iTunes store, watch it download then quickly stream to an Apple TV? OR, do we need to buy from another authorized machine, then transfer to the NAS first? In which case, not a very family friendly option.

Your input and assistance is appreciated. Thanks.

Dalton63841 said:

How bout an external firewire drive? I just got a miniStack v3 and I highly recommend it...Fits up to a 2TB drive, and it can be daisy chained.

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Interesting suggestion. I've used Western Digital MyBook external drives and the performance was utter garbage for streaming content. Easily took 3-4x longer to start a program with the iTunes library on a USB external.

Is this completely mitigated with a firewire external? What about multiple users? At most we'd be streaming content in two rooms, to 2 Apple TVs. The Mac Minis alone handle this well but would that change if they relied on external storage?

Also with external hard drives, I currently have Western Digital MyBooks performing Time Machine backups from both Mac Minis. How would backing up an external firewire drive work? External USB Time Machine backup from the external firewire drive?

Thanks for the insight! Not a bad solution.

Great responses, thanks everyone.

To clarify about the DiskStation, what would be the process then for migrating all of my content from the Mac Minis? Do I simply copy the iTunes libraries onto the DiskStation, then path the library from within iTunes on whatever machines I want to use?

For example, if I drop all of my iTunes library onto the DiskStation, then path a Mac Mini to find the iTunes library there, what happens when I shop in iTunes from then on? Will anything I purchase automatically get deposited onto the DiskStation or will there still be a manual process involved?

Very important I have a solution that still uses a friendly iTunes Store interface for the family. Thanks again!

Omne666 said:

Wherever you tell iTunes to store its media, iTunes will move any purchases there, wether you buy them from within iTunes or from your atv. No handling by you necessary.

Once you set it up in iTunes preferences, you should be fine from then on.

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Cool, thanks for clarifying. Technically you can't buy to own anything on the new Apple TV (rent only), but that makes sense for everything else. Good to go. I'm going with the Station NAS.

Sounds like the DiskStation, accessed locally by one of the Mac Minis over Firewire and using Share Desktop to access from any of the other machines in the house is the right solution. Ordered! Will post results later this week. Many thanks.

Follow-up to my original post.

The DiskStation has proved a very mixed bag. First, performance with the Mac Mini was below expectation. Files transferred slowly over both USB and ethernet and the drive spin up time on access is about 10 seconds, which makes workday music switching off/on a bit tedious.

Then I thought, maybe I should just use the DiskStation as a local backup and file server for my Mac Pro and wedge a bigger hard drive into the Mac Mini I use as a home media server.

The Mac Mini HD upgrade was a piece of cake. Dropped a 750GB HDD in, connected a 2 TB external drive over FireWire, dumped media files onto that 2 TB and now good to go. Setup Time Machine to run to a 2 TB over USB external for backup of media library.

On the Mac Pro with DiskStation side, things went horribly. First problem, I misunderstood the purpose of the eSATA ports in the back of the unit. They are not for connecting directly to a computer, but are instead for eSATA external drives to expand the DS storage space. Unfortunately I only discovered this after spending $250 on an eSATA card and installing that on the Mac Pro.

Then I tried connecting the DiskStation to the Mac Pro over USB and the performance outright sucked. Backups were very slow and I couldn't utilize the DS as a file server on FCP or AE media projects. Transfer rates dragged everything down.

Finally I decided to upgrade the Mac Pro with 2 TB HDDs, then add a Gigabit switch and connect the DiskStation to the Mac Pro over ethernet and utilize it solely as a Time Machine store.

That works wonderfully -- decent transfer rates, good speeds on the Mac Pro because I'm using internal HDDs, reliable backup system, etc.

But now I have a new problem.

The Time Machine software is auto-set to do backups once each hour. This sucks. The DiskStation needs to wake up from sleep mode, mount the drive, connect to my Mac Pro, build a backup package, then perform the transfer. As you can imagine, after hours of this, it gets aggravating and the performance hit while doing other work is unacceptable.

I looked around for a solution -- the "Apple Think Different" way doesn't allow for a simple Time Machine backup routine setting. What I found was a Control Panel hack called "Secrets" that lets you adjust things like the Time Machine clock. Great, I thought. Only it doesn't seem to work. Time Machine ignores the custom setting and sticks with its own routine.

So now what? DiskStation, for being relegated to a glorified Time Machine local storage backup, is proving, now the fault of Time Machine, to be an annoying piece of kit.

Suggestions please.

Meanwhile, with those eSATA ports I recently added to the Mac Pro, I'm looking forward to utilizing a nice media storage kit that I can bring around the studio from workspace to workspace. That proved to be an unexpectedly nice improvement in the workflow.