Migrating iTunes Database

[blacka4]

Good morning folks,

I am in the process trying to consolidate all my firewire and USB drives to 2 rack mount enclosures running RAID 5 and I am not sure if I want to do a direct connection to my Mac Pro or go with some kind of NAS box. I have multiple AppleTv''s and iPads and iPhones that will need access to my content for moving watching, what is my best course of action

I have read up that synology on its own doesn't play well with the apple tv by letting it browse the library like it does when you use home sharing.

 

[paulrbeers]

Good morning folks,

I am in the process trying to consolidate all my firewire and USB drives to 2 rack mount enclosures running RAID 5 and I am not sure if I want to do a direct connection to my Mac Pro or go with some kind of NAS box. I have multiple AppleTv''s and iPads and iPhones that will need access to my content for moving watching, what is my best course of action

I have read up that synology on its own doesn't play well with the apple tv by letting it browse the library like it does when you use home sharing.

You can not play movies and what not directly from any NAS without some secondary source to airplay them. Meaning, if you aren't running iTunes (which you can't do on a NAS) you will need some other device (iOS, Mac, etc) that can access the NAS and then start an Airplay stream to your AppleTV. Your iPads and iPhones can use other applications and play them directly.

IMHO, you are better off running iTunes on a sever and thus you have the whole Home Sharing experience. Quite honestly, I'm not a fan of NAS's anyway so my opinion is biased (I'm a big fan of low power servers w/ DAS since they can do virtually anything).

 

[blacka4]

You can not play movies and what not directly from any NAS without some secondary source to airplay them. Meaning, if you aren't running iTunes (which you can't do on a NAS) you will need some other device (iOS, Mac, etc) that can access the NAS and then start an Airplay stream to your AppleTV. Your iPads and iPhones can use other applications and play them directly.

IMHO, you are better off running iTunes on a sever and thus you have the whole Home Sharing experience. Quite honestly, I'm not a fan of NAS's anyway so my opinion is biased (I'm a big fan of low power servers w/ DAS since they can do virtually anything).

I still have a Mini I was using for this exact purpose. I just bought a 5,1 used 12 core mac pro i was hoping to use instead of the mini. I know its power hungry but if I let it sleep, it will wake on a itunes request, I have tested that and works great. so i guess this inlies the question of what kid of DAS do you suggest?

 

[ColdCase]

The OWC Thunderbolt 4 Bay enclosure is popular and seems to be a sweet spot as far as value for the price, especially if you don't like any of the preconfigured drive options of other products and don't want to deal with hardware RAID constraints. Add the drives you desire, use Disk utility to RAID0 or RAID1 if you want.

I have a 3TB drive there for household time machine destination, a 4TB for my iTunes library, a 5TBdrive for CCC to backup the library and a 2TB drive as a TM destination for the local computer (a 2012 mini in my case).

I would strongly recommend staying away from USB for a DAS, as my life has been much easier since I transitioned from USB to TB enclosures.

 

[blacka4]

i would love to do the thunderbolt enclosures, but I have a older Pro and don'thave thunderbolt..just firewire 800 or SATA as I am thinking about putting a card in

 

[paulrbeers]

i would love to do the thunderbolt enclosures, but I have a older Pro and don'thave thunderbolt..just firewire 800 or SATA as I am thinking about putting a card in

When I had my Mac Pro 1,1 running as my iTunes server I used an eSATA Port Mulitplier card and cheap Sans Digital eSATA 4 bay enclosures. I use Mediasonic 4 bay enclosures now via USB 3.0 on my Mac Mini. Truthfully though, for iTunes videos even USB 2.0 is more than enough to serve up mulitple video streams (Even full Blu-Ray rips have a max of 4.5MB/s which is well below the 32MB/s USB 2.0 can pull).

I don't use RAID enclosures instead relying on RAID 1 in OSX simply because then I can pull the drives from any enclosure and move them to a new one without worrying about the RAID being unavailable (becomes controller independent).

 

[blacka4]

I see. I'm only doing this to service as my media hub for all my devices. One DAS will be iTunes and other will be time machine and data backup.