Another NAS Thread

If you're looking to spend around £500, you can still afford a Synology solution. I tried to find what the going rate is in the UK (this is an assumption of your location, apologies if it's wrong) for a DS213J, but every site I browsed wanted me to log in to see prices.

But I do know that at a local PC parts store, the DS213J is going for CAD $240. Accounting for a bit of markup, I'm sure you can buy everything including a couple of hard drives for it for around the price point you're looking at.

They also have single bay devices that may cost less.

 

Ah, I see. I'm not sure what to tell you then. Unfortunately in my experience, multiple bay NAS devices are hard to come by on the cheap. As you stated, WD's solutions get mixed reviews at best.

As for myself, I only have experience with a D-Link DNS-323 NAS and I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, let alone an OS X user. Most other 2 bay NAS enclosures are going to run you around $150-$200, without the hard drive. Hopefully somebody else can chime in.

I do want to make a note though, RAID1 is not a viable backup strategy. Yes, it provides you with some level of redundancy, but it is still possible to lose all the data on both drives simultaneously. I would look into backing up your NAS, either automated or manual, to another drive and possibly store it offsite to mitigate the risk of data loss.

 

As far as I know, there's no (official) way to be able to stream content to an Apple TV from a NAS without having iTunes act as a streaming device. Even with a NAS, you'd need to have your MacBook running to stream.

Have you considered just getting a USB HDD and storing your videos on it?

PS - balamw, awesome avatar by the way.