How well does NAS perform w/Mac?

[Jshwon]

I will soon be adding a second Mac to my home network. Initially I planned on buying a external HD for the Mini but since I will be adding a iMac am now considering shared storage. What options and how well do these work with the Mac? What are you using?

From what I've seen LaCie, Infrant, and Drobo are reasonable options and simple enough to implement. When connected to a router do these NAS/RAID devices show up as a mounted HD or in the Network section in finder? I would like redundancy, along with a central location to point iPhoto, iTunes, etc on each machine. Most of these devices allow for hot swaps I believe.

Anyone have experience with these or others?

 

[pprior]

I will soon be adding a second Mac to my home network. Initially I planned on buying a external HD for the Mini but since I will be adding a iMac am now considering shared storage. What options and how well do these work with the Mac? What are you using?

From what I've seen LaCie, Infrant, and Drobo are reasonable options and simple enough to implement. When connected to a router do these NAS/RAID devices show up as a mounted HD or in the Network section in finder? I would like redundancy, along with a central location to point iPhoto, iTunes, etc on each machine. Most of these devices allow for hot swaps I believe.

Anyone have experience with these or others?

I have the readyNAS+.

I have been frustrated with ease of use - until the most recent firmware release it was unstable on the network, frequently dropping. this has to do with the translation of AFP and other protocols it supports, I believe.

I use it primarily as a backup for data and for files. I dont' find it very easy to use for primary storage and don't use it for that except for my media server (I serve about 1.5TB of movies from it). It woudl be perfect for time machine except apple won't support NAS.

I'm a relative mac newbie so some of the configuration may be my own fault, however I'm less than enthused about my experience.

I really like the Drobo and would have bought that if it were available at the time. The simple fact that you can time machine Drobo but not the NAS is a huge selling point IMO.

 

[pilotError]

I also have a ReadyNAS NV+ and I don't have any issues with it at all. I have had it hooked up to a Pre-N router and now to an Airport Extreme (gigabit) and its been extremely reliable. You have to jump through a few hoops, but I have Time machine backing up reliably to the NAS. I would like to see Apple support it directly though.

The NAS shows up in the Network section Blue Screen of Death Icon and all.

The newest firmware was a real plus for viewing content on my PS3 using the uPnP service.

 

[Tucom]

Though this is running Windows, it's a server focused variation, and may suite you well if you're looking for a network accessible central storage device -


http://h71036.www7.hp.com/hho/cache/447351-0-0-225-121.html





Peace

 

[pprior]

I also have a ReadyNAS NV+ and I don't have any issues with it at all. I have had it hooked up to a Pre-N router and now to an Airport Extreme (gigabit) and its been extremely reliable. You have to jump through a few hoops, but I have Time machine backing up reliably to the NAS. I would like to see Apple support it directly though.

The NAS shows up in the Network section Blue Screen of Death Icon and all.

The newest firmware was a real plus for viewing content on my PS3 using the uPnP service.

How are you making it work with time machine? What settings do you use on the NV+?

 

[pilotError]

How are you making it work with time machine? What settings do you use on the NV+?

I did the original hack, which was to use an external disk and let time machine create the sparse bundle. Once it was created, you just had to create a share with the same name as the external disk and copy the sparse bundle files there (there's also a hidden file). Once that's done, just mount the share and Time machine sees it and kicks in.

There's also a terminal command that supposedly lets Time Machine see the NAS Drive, but mine was already created, so I don't know if it works.

 

[scottydawg]

We us a ReadyNAS NV+ at our office and it works great (I was pricey though).

 

[chelsel]

another positive vote for the ReadyNAS NV+... extremely easy to manage, works well in a multi OS environment (Windows, Mac, Linux) and performs exceedingly well. I also agree that the latest firmware makes sharing media to a PS3 nice as well.