I would buy it.I hope they do this. We were talking about one of these back when the "Brick" rumor was going on.
Ugly mock-up:
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Apple Developing a Home Media Server?
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XRAID mini, anyone?
Agreed - I've been wondering about this kind of thing ever since the XRaid was killed. The Xraid hardware was well done, though I have my concerns about price considering the cost of the Time Capsule.
Been eyeing a Drobo for a while, but the integration with MobileMe has me thinking I'll watch and wait.
Any photoshop gurus out there want to mock-up what a mini-XRaid might look like?
Agreed - I've been wondering about this kind of thing ever since the XRaid was killed. The Xraid hardware was well done, though I have my concerns about price considering the cost of the Time Capsule.
Been eyeing a Drobo for a while, but the integration with MobileMe has me thinking I'll watch and wait.
Any photoshop gurus out there want to mock-up what a mini-XRaid might look like?
I would love a home server product from Apple. From what I hear, the Microsoft Windows Home Server product is one of the few things they got right the first time around. Centralized backup, remote access, user management, media storage, etc.
I could picture myself downloading a song on one Mac, have that instantly synced with the home server, then that synced with any other computer in the house that has my user account. MobileMe handles syncing for contacts, calendar, etc, but nothing can do that type of seamless syncing for media yet.
Time Capsule does the job with 1 or 2 computers, but only for backup. After that, it really can't scale. In many homes you are talking 3-5 computers on the same network. Throw in a couple of iPhones/iTouches, an Apple TV or two, and you really need a real dedicated home server to handle this.
I could picture myself downloading a song on one Mac, have that instantly synced with the home server, then that synced with any other computer in the house that has my user account. MobileMe handles syncing for contacts, calendar, etc, but nothing can do that type of seamless syncing for media yet.
Time Capsule does the job with 1 or 2 computers, but only for backup. After that, it really can't scale. In many homes you are talking 3-5 computers on the same network. Throw in a couple of iPhones/iTouches, an Apple TV or two, and you really need a real dedicated home server to handle this.
Multicontent Streaming
If this is accessible by multiple devices, I would hope this would support unique content streams e.g. my wife and I watching a movie in one room, my son listening to some song playlist in his bedroom and my other son watching a movie in the basement.
If this is accessible by multiple devices, I would hope this would support unique content streams e.g. my wife and I watching a movie in one room, my son listening to some song playlist in his bedroom and my other son watching a movie in the basement.
If they use MobileMe, they should add some extra iphone-like buttons on the web app of MobileMe for music and movies.
This is something that I have wanted to do for years. I can't tell you how many times I've been at work wanting to listen to a particular CD on my iPod/iPhone and I couldn't because the song wasn't on my iPod or iPhone at the time and there's no way to sync with my iTunes library over the internet. If only there was a way to tie in my iTunes library with MobileMe, I could put songs from home onto my iPod connected to my computer at work. That would be awesome.
I feel like this product would tie the end user down more than some of the current solutions out there. For example, I would hope Apple wouldn't require users to sign up for MobileMe to have full access remotely. I could understand if it was an option where you would get some specialized services, but if they want it to be widely adopted then they can't be too limiting with the capabilities.
I don't agree. It think this is beyond a server/terminal model, where the terminal is just a dumb interface extension with the server doing all the heavy lifting, though there may be instances where that makes sense. This is next logical step for people that have been digital for a few years and are needing to normalize all their assets and access them from wherever they are.
What would be awesome is if the server is smart enough to know what the capabilities of the device are and adjust accordingly, so if I have an HD movie in iTunes, it automajically scales down the quality for streaming so I don't have to have two versions. I have more music than I'd care to keep on my Macbook Pro's 160GB drive but I still want to have access when I'm out and about and have the urge. I've been waiting for this kind of thing. If its done right, it could be huge.
I would only really go for it if it could act as a HTPC as well. I'm planning on getting a Mac mini + Drobo when the new mini comes out (assuming FW800). My G5 + 2x Dual eSATA drive enclosures is not only bulky and not as redundant as a Drobo, it can't play HD video if its life depended on it.
Software version
One other thought...it would be great if this wasn't specifically a hardware product. I would be nice if those of us with a MacPro could designate a drive or partition as the "home media drive" that other apple devices could sync with.
One other thought...it would be great if this wasn't specifically a hardware product. I would be nice if those of us with a MacPro could designate a drive or partition as the "home media drive" that other apple devices could sync with.
Absolutely. Sharing within a subnet at home really should be much better. Sharing playlists really doesn't cut it--one should be able to have a central itunes library with each user having his/her own xml data for playlists, playcounts, ratings, etc. as well as full access for syncing to an iPod.
How coudl that be objectionable to record cos.? Do they really want to make my wife and me buy two copies of a CD? Come on . . .
And if the issue is, say, colleges, simple enough to limit access to say 10 users.
Well ... except for that little file corruption bug - http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/27/windows-home-server-bug-corrupts-files/
I hope it has RAID and multiple internal drives capabilities as well as external drives ports (USB2, FW400, FW800, eSATA). Let's also hope it's nearly silent. My Mac minis have spoiled me, I can't stand computer hardware noise anymore.
Mine gets rather noisy when playing HD stuff. Watching TV via eyeTV is loud because the progressive deinterlacing is warming up the GPU which is not really well cooled.
So I built a noise insulating box and have the Mini inside. Doesn't get to hot but the noise is pretty much gone.
Anyway, such a home server would be mighty cool. It wouldn't need an optical drive, so you can make that thing pretty small. I'm still figuring out a reliable way to share folders from my attached USB drive across windows and Mac users. Even on Leopard, that's a no-go. SharePoints doensn't help either. Even using AFP, it always forgets the password, disconnects randomly or refuses to diconnect the network computer until you force-quit Finder.
Hate to say it, but Apple's not too good in terms of easy networking. It's a shame, really.
Makes total sense. I've come to the conclusion that after 3 months of copying moves from my NetFlicks subscription, and trying to view them on three separate Macs, there has to be a better way.
I use a WHS machine I built myself and can house 12 drives and it works great.
So if i'm to get one from apple it needs to support at least 6 drives and allow for drives of any size and support parity as opposed to mirroring for redundancy. Then I would consider it.
So if i'm to get one from apple it needs to support at least 6 drives and allow for drives of any size and support parity as opposed to mirroring for redundancy. Then I would consider it.
That only affected a small number of users with specific apps under very specific circumstances. And it was fixed long ago.
I would be happy if they would eliminate the Apple TV pass code and stop knocking out support for NAS drives that are perfectly capable of working with Time Machine.
This forced ecosystem is very disturbing lately.
It would make sense why 10.5.6 disabled my NAS backups. I bet we see it at Macworld.
This forced ecosystem is very disturbing lately.
It would make sense why 10.5.6 disabled my NAS backups. I bet we see it at Macworld.
I knew I shouldn't have given up on this! (Should have kept my MWSF 2009 announcement prediction.)
Since the home server rumor was revived, maybe the mini-tablet rumor will too?AppleInsider said:
And yes, I definitely want to be able to access media and other data elsewhere. It'd be nice to have and reduces my need to copy files from one place to another.
So, rumored for MWSF 2009…
- iMac, possibly quad-core
- Redesigned Mac mini
- iPhone nano
- Snow Leopard demo/preview
- Home Media Server
There would be no need for a 32GB iPhone then, because you would have everything through a cell tower. I hope laptops are like this one day, so every computer could be like the MacBook Air.
How much would that hold, about 12TB? I don't think I would need that much unless I started ripping DVDs like crazy.
How much would that hold, about 12TB? I don't think I would need that much unless I started ripping DVDs like crazy.
Maybe they are making a new Mini.
And maybe they are making a home server.
And maybe this new home server will be the new "Mac Mini"?
Perhaps the Mini will stay, but the device will be different. Nothing is stopping them from reusing names. It would inherit the hype of and name of the original, but be marketed and used entirely differently. Just a thought.
And maybe they are making a home server.
And maybe this new home server will be the new "Mac Mini"?
Perhaps the Mini will stay, but the device will be different. Nothing is stopping them from reusing names. It would inherit the hype of and name of the original, but be marketed and used entirely differently. Just a thought.
I wouldn't recommend the Drobo. If the hardware (the Drobo) fails, all your data is not accessible until you ship in the Drobo and get a replacement after a while. And it's a small company, so if you're out of warranty, your data is gone for good, there's no software to read the files.
Instead, buy two same sized USB hard drives, one for data, one for the backup (Time Machine, Super Duper, Carbon Copy Cloner) of the data disk. You can use OSX's built-in software RAID so one drive mirrors the other. Or you set up Time machine, that has the advantage that you can recover accidentally deleted stuff. If you go the Time Machine route, you can also use differently sized drives.
A decent 1500 GB Drive is not really expensive anymore, you can get a Seagate Freeagent Desk (don't bother with the more expensive Mac version) for about 130 Dollars. Those drives are reliable, very quiet an power efficient (they work with OSX's energy saving setting "put hard drive to sleep after x minutes"). Those drives also come with a native OSX diagnostic utility which tells you when a drive is starting to fail (S.M.A.R.T. technology plus some proprietary stuff that looks for corrupted files and sectors).
