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Creating my Apple space - first up, Synology NAS?

A

Anastacio

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 18, 2010
190
0
Denmark
For a long time, I have been thinking, of turning the family's house into an Apple "environment". I already got an iPhone 4, iPad 1 and Mac Mini 2010 model. Here's my plan, do you think it can work out?

My Room:
Mac Mini - for watching my movie collection through Plex on the HDTV.
iMac 27" 2012 model - for editing photos, HD videoes, programming websites and toying with Xcode.

Living Room:
Apple TV - for streaming my Plex collection through to the living room after jailbreaking it, for showing off vacational photos alongside music from my iTunes library.

My bedroom:
Apple TV - again for streaming my Plex media, so I can watch a movie at night.

Throughout the house:
iPad 3 - for reading and consuming for the whole family and guests.
iPhone 4/5s - for the family to take pictures and let it go to the cloud, down to the Apple TV in the living room.
MacBook Air - for producing and writing texts for my secondary work.

---

But I want all of these devices to connect each other, and the main piece shall be anything else but an Apple product. I'm thinking about a Synology NAS 4-bay with at least 4TB.

Questions:
- How much do I need to put aside for back ups on all machines?
- Will I need to connect the Synology to my wireless router, so that the data and media can stream out to all the devices?
- Which Hard Drives do I need to get? Two 2TB ones? 2.5" or 3.5" ?
Now thinking of three 2TBs of these:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0042SGDVG/ref=cm_cr_asin_lnk
- Perhaps, you got a link for a Amazon.co.uk product?
Would this be what I need:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS...YSV4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1311460470&sr=8-2

?
 
Last edited:
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That's a huge "it depends."

You've told us all about your machines, but not much about what you're putting on them.

A few considerations: always good to have an extra computer; but you've got more than one.

Do you need offsite storage? Your current backup plan is limited since you don't protect against theft, fire or other catastrophes.

Are you storing lots of media files? HD TV, for example?

Do you need versioning?

Rob
 
robgendreau said:
That's a huge "it depends."

You've told us all about your machines, but not much about what you're putting on them.

A few considerations: always good to have an extra computer; but you've got more than one.

Do you need offsite storage? Your current backup plan is limited since you don't protect against theft, fire or other catastrophes.

Are you storing lots of media files? HD TV, for example?

Do you need versioning?

Rob
Click to expand...

Exactly. The amount of computers doesn't matter but the amount of data does.

Also, do you want redundancy? I'm not sure does the NAS you linked support RAIDs but you could consider RAID 5 for extra safety. RAID 5 means that one of your HDs can fail without any data being lost. The downside is that you lose one the capacity of one HD (4x2TB would give 6TB of usable space). However, if you store nothing else than backups, RAID 5 would be great.

Moreover, if you do HD videos on the iMac, I would try to wire it to your network instead of being wireless. That will produce much faster speeds when connecting to the NAS.
 
Oh yea, I would like one with RAID5, so that it can not fail.

I'll be storing:
- Back ups of all the machines.
- Documents for my work.
- HD Movies.
- Large quality photos from vacations etc.

That's practically what I'll be storing.

I were hoping to do all wireless, as the living room is downstairs, or else I would need a really long cable going from the NAS up here to downstair, but I guess that would be the greatest solution for the HD movies, cause I don't want stuttering.

So would this Synology be good enough?
 
I have a 4 bay DS410 Synology NAS with 2 2tb drives. This config yields 5.8tb of storage. Time Machine works fine (you need the latest 3.2 beta software on the NAS for Time Machine to work) I have no problem steaming both music an videos to PC's throughout the house. The Synology offers a lot more than just storage. It Has a web server, photo server, email server and lots more, it is a great unit. As far as time machine use, it will use as much disk space that's available. So if you want to limit the amount of space TM uses, you will have to partition you Synology into at least 2 drives. When TM partition is full, it will start deleting oldest backups to make room for new backups.

HTH
 
Wow, great information, thanks!
Though, I guess a Synology DS411j NAS would be good enough for home use?
 
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