Hi all, I have a reasonably large music / TV / film library (<8TB) which is currently resides on a cheap external enclosure housing 4 x 4TB Seagate "Green" Drives. My 27" iMac unfortunately missed out on USB 3.0 so the drives are connected to my Mac over USB 2.0. We also have various other Macs in the house.
The 4 drives are configured as two concatenated pairs of drive and CCC backs up the library to the spare pair of drives.
We have 6 Apple TVs and about the same number of Airport Extreme's so the library can be used on all the TVs in the house (it used to work on iPad's too but not any longer - thanks Apple!).
The current setup is a bit painful in that I can't configure the power management settings of the Seagate drives (Seagate doesn't seem to support Mac) and they are forever going to sleep on me making using the drives a pain while I wait 30 seconds for them to spool up.
Apple TV just about works but most days I have to restart a given Apple TV, or iTunes or both for them to work. I'm almost resigned to this as Apple's support for Apple TV seems very poor (e.g. inability to use a large library with iPads). I also have most of the ATVs directly connected to an Airport using Ethernet as Wifi performance seems a bit flakey.
Anyhow a new iMac is on the horizon and a new mass storage solution also beckons. The requirement is to have a set of drives that are always spooled up; that are backed up using CCC or perhaps something more elegant (Drobo?). I think the library needs to be accessible from more than one iMac (as on occasion there may be more than 3 Apple TV's trying to access content) but I think only my iMac needs to be able to edit the library so I'm thinking Home Sharing may be sufficient.
Anyhow I would be very, very grateful if someone could give me a steer on whether I should be going NAS or DAS, what drives to use (Hitachi?), what enclosure and how best to configure / share the library across multiple Macs / Apple TVs.
Thanks in anticipation,
Rob
The 4 drives are configured as two concatenated pairs of drive and CCC backs up the library to the spare pair of drives.
We have 6 Apple TVs and about the same number of Airport Extreme's so the library can be used on all the TVs in the house (it used to work on iPad's too but not any longer - thanks Apple!).
The current setup is a bit painful in that I can't configure the power management settings of the Seagate drives (Seagate doesn't seem to support Mac) and they are forever going to sleep on me making using the drives a pain while I wait 30 seconds for them to spool up.
Apple TV just about works but most days I have to restart a given Apple TV, or iTunes or both for them to work. I'm almost resigned to this as Apple's support for Apple TV seems very poor (e.g. inability to use a large library with iPads). I also have most of the ATVs directly connected to an Airport using Ethernet as Wifi performance seems a bit flakey.
Anyhow a new iMac is on the horizon and a new mass storage solution also beckons. The requirement is to have a set of drives that are always spooled up; that are backed up using CCC or perhaps something more elegant (Drobo?). I think the library needs to be accessible from more than one iMac (as on occasion there may be more than 3 Apple TV's trying to access content) but I think only my iMac needs to be able to edit the library so I'm thinking Home Sharing may be sufficient.
Anyhow I would be very, very grateful if someone could give me a steer on whether I should be going NAS or DAS, what drives to use (Hitachi?), what enclosure and how best to configure / share the library across multiple Macs / Apple TVs.
Thanks in anticipation,
Rob