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Mac-friendly NAS Drive

shinji

shinji

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Mar 18, 2007
1,336
1,518
I'm looking for a NAS drive which supports AFP and/or Bonjour. Any suggestions?

I looked through smallnetbuilder, and the Western Digital My Book World Edition appears to, but their forum has a bunch of posts complaining about Snow Leopard compatibility...same thing with the Seagate Blackarmor NAS.

I have wired gigabit lan...looking for speed as the next priority and I'd like to keep it under $300.
 
what specific purposes will you be using the NAS for? are AFP/bonjour a necessity? NFS is a lot more prominent in NASs and comes at a much cheaper price, and integrates into OSX easily.

if you really want AFP - go with LaCie.
 
I'm using ReadyNAS units and they have pretty decent Mac support. You aren't going to hit your price point with them though.

.
 
shinji said:
What about something like this?

image-3160356-10521304
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822122022&cm_re=readynas_duo-_-22-122-022-_-Product

@DoFot9
Using it for HD streaming, backups, keeping certain files accessible to multiple macs here, etc. AFP/Bonjour aren't absolutely essential, but I'd prefer it if the NAS had it as an option.
Click to expand...
speeds up to 25MB/s? thats a bit pathetic. you should be hitting +80MB/s with a NAS.

wouldnt a Time Capsule do the job for you? :rolleyes:

inxtron probably have the best looking enclosures - i cant see any that have AFP - but they support bonjour (and have bittorrent services, iTunes servers etc).

if you are after the cheapest enclosures, macsales.com is always great. these drives are in australia - but the brands are great, might be worth seeing if you can find them elsewhere :)
 
Is 80 MB/s realistic on a home NAS in this price range? Not many of them are doing that on the smallnetbuilder charts when you set max to $300 http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_nas&Itemid=190

I don't know if the new WD My Book Live which claims 100 MB/s reads can actually do that or just relies on caching to skew the results.

And isn't time capsule pretty slow? Even if it's not, I'd like the ability to stream through a built-in DLNA server, which almost all of the ones I've looked at include Twonky.
 
shinji said:
Is 80 MB/s realistic on a home NAS in this price range? Not many of them are doing that on the smallnetbuilder charts when you set max to $300 http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_nas&Itemid=190

I don't know if the new WD My Book Live which claims 100 MB/s reads can actually do that or just relies on caching to skew the results.

And isn't time capsule pretty slow? Even if it's not, I'd like the ability to stream through a built-in DLNA server, which almost all of the ones I've looked at include Twonky.
Click to expand...
80MB/s is very realistic IMO - using gigabit cat5e ethernet cables and gigabit controllers in the end machines. i regularly transfer around those speeds. 100MB/s is quite unrealistic given overhead, the max theoretical limit is 125MB/s, but overhead and error checking come into that so its generally <100MB/s.

TC will give a max of about 30MB/s, they limit it for a number of various reasons of which i am not sure of.
 
DoFoT9 said:
80MB/s is very realistic IMO - using gigabit cat5e ethernet cables and gigabit controllers in the end machines. i regularly transfer around those speeds. 100MB/s is quite unrealistic given overhead, the max theoretical limit is 125MB/s, but overhead and error checking come into that so its generally <100MB/s.

TC will give a max of about 30MB/s, they limit it for a number of various reasons of which i am not sure of.
Click to expand...

What NAS are you using? I know transferring between two computers on a gigabit LAN those speeds are possible, but don't most consumer NAS have fairly weak processors that become the limiting factor?

I really don't know, personally, that's just what I've gleaned from reading smallnetbuilder.
 
shinji said:
What NAS are you using? I know transferring between two computers on a gigabit LAN those speeds are possible, but don't most consumer NAS have fairly weak processors that become the limiting factor?

I really don't know, personally, that's just what I've gleaned from reading smallnetbuilder.
Click to expand...
i guess i should have mentioned that this was with a RAID enclosure - however with my 4+ year old LaCie NAS drive i can quite easily hit + 40MB/s (the drive inside is the limiting factor in this instance).

it all depends i guess - the things you are after wouldnt be limited by network throughput anyway.
 
shinji said:
Is 80 MB/s realistic on a home NAS in this price range? Not many of them are doing that on the smallnetbuilder charts when you set max to $300 http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_nas&Itemid=190
Click to expand...

No 80MB/s is not realistic at all for $300 NAS, no matter how may drive bays you're looking at. The comparison chart you've got there pretty much sums it up.

The limiting factor is not the gigabit ethernet connection (all of them have it), rather than the processing power and RAM. Those parts are expensive. NAS systems that saturate the gigabit port (like the Thecus N7700) are equipped with dual core processors in order to perform that good.
 
Transporteur said:
No 80MB/s is not realistic at all for $300 NAS, no matter how may drive bays you're looking at. The comparison chart you've got there pretty much sums it up.

The limiting factor is not the gigabit ethernet connection (all of them have it), rather than the processing power and RAM. Those parts are expensive. NAS systems that saturate the gigabit port (like the Thecus N7700) are equipped with dual core processors in order to perform that good.
Click to expand...

PC media server comes into mind there - cheaper and better :)
 
DoFoT9 said:
PC media server comes into mind there - cheaper and better :)
Click to expand...

"Better" is relative. For most users a simple, small box that is easy to maintain is more convenient than a PC, plus offers multiple services out of the box, no big configuration required.

If you build your own media PC you have to be picky with the hardware and even more with the software.

Personally I always chose the dedicated file server route, simply because there are no NAS boxes that fulfil my needs. But if I could, I would go NAS all the way.
 
Transporteur said:
"Better" is relative. For most users a simple, small box that is easy to maintain is more convenient than a PC, plus offers multiple services out of the box, no big configuration required.

If you build your own media PC you have to be picky with the hardware and even more with the software.

Personally I always chose the dedicated file server route, simply because there are no NAS boxes that fulfil my needs. But if I could, I would go NAS all the way.
Click to expand...

without doubt i agree there. the NAS certainly is easier - but there are many drawbacks as you said. most do not natively support AFP, bonjour, iTunes media server, ps3 media server, etc.

for me, i am fed up with external enclosures - and i see the only benefit (for me) as being that they use less power. i will probably purchase a Fractal Refine case (can hold + 10 HDDs)+ low end Core2Duo CPU for less then the price of a NAS enclosure - it will work better in every way other then power usage (which would be a close match though).
 
I'm using a QNAP TS-239 Pro II. The speeds are pretty good as it has an Atom processor, but one thing I didn't consider when buying (doh!) is that the speeds end up being limited by the internal drive of the Mac Mini I'm connecting to it from.
AFP/Bonjour work fine, and it runs Time Machine for my 3 machines over GigE ethernet.
 
I'm also looking for a NAS drive, just to store my music, photos, videos, and whatever else I might need to. I also need it to be able to stream content to my Xbox 360 and iPad/iPhone.
I was also looking at the WD My Book World Edition.

Does the DLNA server work properly? (For streaming content to xbox 360)
And does it work properly as an iTunes media server so that I don't need to store my iTunes library on my laptop?
 
Synology Is Very Mac Friendly

I have a Synology DS110J with a 2TB Western Digital WD20EARS drive. The Synology NAS line is so Mac friendly that it's scary. Check out what SmallNetBuilder has to say about them.

I've heard good things about the QNAP NAS line, but can't confirm their goodness.
 
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