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Help me create my media centre/network

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hankkosovo

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 23, 2009
48
0
I’m look for the best solution for a media centre and network, and I was hoping from some input from you guys.

I’n our place we have a macbook pro, mac mini, ipad and iphone. The mac mini is plugged in to the television in the living room and the macbook is in the office.

What I ideally want is 2 hard drives, 1 partitioned three ways, macbook time machine, mac mini time machine and the third partition as a media file server, the other hard drive to be a back up of this one. Then all the devices in the house will be able to view/use the media files over wireless from the same file server partition.

Initially I thought about just getting an airport extreme and connecting the hard drives to that.

But then I wasn’t sure if the ios devices would be able to read files from the hard drive, as for home sharing to work, they have to go through itunes don’t they? Or is it possible to do what I initially thought?

The other option I thought of was to use the mac mini as the hub, plug both hard drives in to that and then the ios devices would be able to read the media files through itunes home sharing.

What do you guys think?

Also, how would I go about continuously cloning the first hard drive to the second?
 
P

paskyhome

macrumors newbie
Mar 3, 2010
2
0
My experiences with Media Centre setup.

I have a similar setup at home including an airport extreme. I did try connecting the hard drives to the USB port on the airport and sharing them to the Mac Mini but found problems with it. It kept having the hard drives going to sleep and then the MAC Mini could not wake them up when it tried to access them.

I ended up giving up on that method and attached the drives to the MAC Mini directly. This lets the MAC Mini act as the server sharing the contents of the drives and the sleep issue is no longer a problem. Of course this would be necessary in order to use iTunes home sharing to the IOS devices since you can't do that from the Airport Extreme to the best of my knowledge.

As for cloning the drives, you might try Carbon Copy Cloner which can be setup to do this for you and it is donation ware. Just use Google to look for disk cloning in OSX and you will find CCC and some other options you may want to consider.
 
J

jdreier

macrumors member
Dec 20, 2010
52
0
I have a similar setup also. My "media center" is a mac mini connected to my TV. It has external drives that store all my media. I can access the data from my 2 macbook pros, iphones, and my apple tv in another room. It works great.

If you wen't with the two drive setup through the mac mini... why not make one drive nothing but the media storage hub. Then make the other drive the backup drive for everything in the house. (partition it 4 ways?) including a backup for the media on the 1st drive.

The way you described you would be backing up time machine backups. To me thats a little over redundant.... then again, you can never have too many backups.
 
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