Looking for a little advice from anyone who with first-hand experience of external HDDs for their Mac Mini ... Forgive me if I go on a bit - I don't want to omit information which might suggest an obvious alternative solution to one of the eminently knowledgeable folks on here.
Originally, I bought the 500Gb version of this LaCie HDD to act as storage for our Mini, which serves as our media centre. The drive is fine, but it is a touch too noisy to have running in the same room (the living room) as the TV.
Consequently, it was banished upstairs and connected to our iMac. All of our movies, TV shows and music are stored on it, and the Mini accesses them via Airport.
All well and good but for some reason, performance has recently started to degrade in the later parts of the evening, particularly weekends. I suspect that the proliferation of other wireless networks on our street over the last 12 months is just creating a lot of noise and degrading our Airport performance. Whatever the cause, video playback now stutters so badly as to be unwatchable at times.
Since you can never have enough storage, and with and upgrade to Leopard (and Time Machine) in the offing, I thought the most obvious solution would be to move all the media files back to a local drive attached to the Mini and take Airport out of the equation.
I was looking at one of these puppies but the two most important things to me are:
1) The noise. Whatever drive I go for needs to be as close to silent as possible
2) The styling. It doesn't have to actually stack with the Mini like these two, but it does have to look at home inside a TV cabinet.
So ... any recommendations for a 500GB+ external drive that meets my needs?
Alternatively, if anyone has any ideas about how to fix the Airport issue, I'd be just as happy going down that route.
Many thanks!
Jim
Originally, I bought the 500Gb version of this LaCie HDD to act as storage for our Mini, which serves as our media centre. The drive is fine, but it is a touch too noisy to have running in the same room (the living room) as the TV.
Consequently, it was banished upstairs and connected to our iMac. All of our movies, TV shows and music are stored on it, and the Mini accesses them via Airport.
All well and good but for some reason, performance has recently started to degrade in the later parts of the evening, particularly weekends. I suspect that the proliferation of other wireless networks on our street over the last 12 months is just creating a lot of noise and degrading our Airport performance. Whatever the cause, video playback now stutters so badly as to be unwatchable at times.
Since you can never have enough storage, and with and upgrade to Leopard (and Time Machine) in the offing, I thought the most obvious solution would be to move all the media files back to a local drive attached to the Mini and take Airport out of the equation.
I was looking at one of these puppies but the two most important things to me are:
1) The noise. Whatever drive I go for needs to be as close to silent as possible
2) The styling. It doesn't have to actually stack with the Mini like these two, but it does have to look at home inside a TV cabinet.
So ... any recommendations for a 500GB+ external drive that meets my needs?
Alternatively, if anyone has any ideas about how to fix the Airport issue, I'd be just as happy going down that route.
Many thanks!
Jim