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Advice on Media Storage

J

Jdtwyo

macrumors newbie
Original poster
I need help. I have a 2TB external drive connected to my IMAC that houses all of my media. I serve everything in my house using ATV and Itunes from the Imac.

I need more space and some back up protection, and dont want to break the bank. What are people using as far as NAS vs Drobo etc. How well do the NAS's like Synology work in this setup. Thanks for the Help.

JT
 
I have a Mac Mini as an iTunes server. The library is on a 3TB USB 3 external drive and I have two additional 3TB drives that I rotate for backups. I use a CCC script to clone the drive every night. My library is still under 1TB, so I expect this setup to last for awhile. 🙂
 
I too use a Mac Mini as a media server, I switch it on when I require it for my TV Shows and Movies. I keep none of the media on it and have a Drobo 3TB Drive attached to it via firewire!

The drobo is great as it contains 4 bays and spreads the data across in a RAID format, but if one drive fails, the rest will carry on and you just need to swap the bad drive out and it works like magic! Likewise for expanding!
 
I use a Mac mini, too. I have a couple hard drives hanging off an AirPort Extreme that I use for my libraries. Everything is backed up to a Synology NAS each night. I love the DS Audio app that Synology has, too. I also back up to Crashplan.

I want to mention that I have a 4 slot NAS and one of the drives got corrupted when I was on vacation. When I tried to rebuild it, another drive failed. I sent Synology a message about the issue, but it took them several days to respond. Since I was just using it for a backup, I wiped all the drives and backed up everything again. Not sure if Synology could have helped with recovery, but I would never use a NAS without having the same file on a seperate drive for backup.
 
I am running a Mac Mini to serve media (via iTunes) to multiple AppleTVs. My data is stored on a Drobo 5N attached via gigabit ethernet. The Drobo contains five 3TB drives with dual redundancy, giving me just over 8 TB of storage. There is a bit of lag initially loading the videos, but once they get started (usually about 10-15 seconds) they stream fine.

And, no, I don’t have 8TB of media. I only use about 3GB for media. The rest is used for backups, archives and other storage.

It would be a bit expensive to set this configuration up from scratch, but in my case, it was very evolutionary. I got the Drobo from a friend (financial hardship). The drives are all Seagate barracuda drives from the 3TB GoFlex units. I got most of them online at good prices, and just cracked the cases and used the drives.

In the 2+ years since I’ve had this setup, I’ve only lost one drive. All I had to do was pull it and replace it, and then sit back while Drobo rebuilt everything.
 
I had a Mac Mini and Drobo Mini / Thunderbolt set up. I felt it was a bit much and wanted everything in one box. I sold both to cover a new Synology DS214play (with some cash to spare).

I run video station on the Synology - that streams to the Xbox with transcoding on the fly. For Apple TV I used the DS Video app on the iPhone or iPad and send it via AirPlay. I don't need to convert and load in iTunes this way. Works perfect with both media devices served. Also get the added benefit of being able to stream my media remotely using the Synology iOS apps.

You could also accomplish something similar by running Plex on a Mac Mini.
 
Jdtwyo said:
I need help. I have a 2TB external drive connected to my IMAC that houses all of my media. I serve everything in my house using ATV and Itunes from the Imac.
Click to expand...

In my opinion, you already have the best setup possible - a Mac with iTunes and direct attach storage. If you need more of that, buy more of that.

A.
 
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