AEBS Questions - Time Machine and AppleTV

[hollerz]

Couple of questions about the new AEBS.

If I connect a USB2 HDD to the AEBS, can I watch the movies that I've stored on it using AppleTV?

If I connect 2 USB2 HDD's to the AEBS, can I back up my internal hard drive, and the first USB HDD, to the second USB HDD using Time Machine?

I realize neither of these things are actually out yet lol. I'm thinking the first question will definitely work. Not sure about the second one!

 

[Krevnik]

If I connect a USB2 HDD to the AEBS, can I watch the movies that I've stored on it using AppleTV?

Somewhat. You need iTunes streaming the media, so you will need a computer actually running. However, you can tell iTunes to store its media on the USB2 HDD, and stream it that way, but it will be slow, and you might have issues (due to the slow performance) with video down the road.

If I connect 2 USB2 HDD's to the AEBS, can I back up my internal hard drive, and the first USB HDD, to the second USB HDD using Time Machine?

This one is up in the air. In theory, it should work, but there is a bug preventing it from actually working. Also, realize that Time Machine is meant to back up your computer, so with Time Machine, you only have one set of drives to backup. If you use Time Machine to do this, then the second USB HDD will need to have room to backup your boot drive as well, unless you decide not to backup your boot drive at all.

If you want to clone drives, Disk Utility and apps like Carbon Copy Cloner can already do this.

Personally, I would recommend a proper NAS instead of the AEBS (although they are more expensive). Infrant makes a very good line of disk-less NAS devices, which you can put into RAID 1 (mirrored, so you get that backup that you seem to want here), or even RAID 5 if you need space and redundancy. Then again, I might hold off on such an expensive purchase until AFTER Leopard comes out to make sure the bug with Time Machine and network shares is fixed.

 

[hollerz]

Somewhat. You need iTunes streaming the media, so you will need a computer actually running. However, you can tell iTunes to store its media on the USB2 HDD, and stream it that way, but it will be slow, and you might have issues (due to the slow performance) with video down the road.

That sounds dissapointing. I'm getting a MBP to replace my Mac Pro as my main computer, and I won't have enough space to store all of my movies and music on the internal HDD. I don't want to connect a USB HDD to the MBP itself as I was hoping the power cable would be the only cable coming from the MBP!

 

[glhiii]

Disk not working with new AEBS

I have a new AEBS -- it seems to work very well, except that it just does not work properly with a usb hard disk. At first, it recognized it, but was very slow. Now, it won't recognize it at all -- I tried 3 different ones, all of which mount via usb on the desktop when connected to the computer. Perhaps a software update will fix this, but at the moment a AEBS usb hard disk is useless. Connecting the normal way (through the new AEBS) gave throughput about twice as fast as I got with the AEBS-attached disk (when it worked).