NAS Doesn't Show Up

[rayward]

I just bought a NexStar HX4 enclosure, put two WD Red 3TB drives in it, attached it to my iMac (Yosemite) and formatted it using Disk Utility to be a single volume. When I ejected the NAS and tried to connect it by attaching it to my Airport Extreme - via USB (it does not have ethernet) - it does not show up in Finder.

Anyone have any ideas why?

Thanks!

 

[DeltaMac]

I read that the Airport Extreme is sometimes not compatible with some external drive interfaces (the electronics in the enclosure, not the hard drive itself). And, you do need to make sure that the drives are not encrypted, and are formatted to work with the Airport Extreme.

This article may help answer your questions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202807

Are the drives formatted as a striped volume, or a mirrored volume?

 

[rayward]

Thanks for the reply.

The disks are formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaling). There's no RAID setting, is just one volume (JBOD) as it's for backup only so I don't need any built-in redundancy.

I am concerned that it may be the enclosure, so I am trying to see if that's the case.

 

[matreya]

Thanks for the reply.

The disks are formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaling). There's no RAID setting, is just one volume (JBOD) as it's for backup only so I don't need any built-in redundancy.

You say that you formatted the TWO disks to be just one volume... the only way you can do that is with Software RAID (built into OS X). JBOD is not what you think it is. JBOD is Just a Bunch Of Disks, which would mean that your drives would appear as 2 separate hard drives.

Airport Extreme USB port won't work with your setup. If you want a 6TB volume to connect to your AE, then you'll need a single hard drive with an enclosure that supports the 6TB hard drive.

 

[ColdCase]

An extreme is not going to see multiple drives combined into one by disk utility. It will see the drives as separate devices.

When you use airport utility to control the Extreme, and click on the disk tab, are the the disk(s) listed? Is file sharing enabled?

I though you had to format the drives via the extreme, using the airport utility, but maybe I missed something along the way..

 

[rayward]

You say that you formatted the TWO disks to be just one volume... the only way you can do that is with Software RAID (built into OS X). JBOD is not what you think it is. JBOD is Just a Bunch Of Disks, which would mean that your drives would appear as 2 separate hard drives.

I formatted the disks to be one drive with Disk Utility.

Airport Extreme USB port won't work with your setup. If you want a 6TB volume to connect to your AE, then you'll need a single hard drive with an enclosure that supports the 6TB hard drive.

I was hoping that the disks - once formatted to be a single drive - would show up as such when attached to my router. It may be the formatting but, at this point, I suspect it may be the enclosure.

 

[laurihoefs]

You say that you formatted the TWO disks to be just one volume... the only way you can do that is with Software RAID (built into OS X). JBOD is not what you think it is. JBOD is Just a Bunch Of Disks, which would mean that your drives would appear as 2 separate hard drives.

Airport Extreme USB port won't work with your setup. If you want a 6TB volume to connect to your AE, then you'll need a single hard drive with an enclosure that supports the 6TB hard drive.

JBOD can also mean a single volume spanned across multiple non-RAID disks.

 

[matreya]

I was hoping that the disks - once formatted to be a single drive - would show up as such when attached to my router. It may be the formatting but, at this point, I suspect it may be the enclosure.

You formatted your drives, then used Disk Utility to create a concatenated disk set, which is only recognized by Macs connected to the enclosure.

There's nothing wrong with the enclosure. What you should have done was buy a 6TB drive if you wanted a 6TB volume for your airport basestation.

----------

JBOD can also mean a single volume spanned across multiple non-RAID disks.

They were always just called SPAN to me...

 

[laurihoefs]

They were always just called SPAN to me...

Hey, I like SPAN better too, but JBOD is often used by some manufacturers

 

[rayward]

There's nothing wrong with the enclosure. What you should have done was buy a 6TB drive if you wanted a 6TB volume for your airport basestation.

Well crap.

Would this be the same if I had the enclosure connected to the basestation by ethernet? The NexStar is USB or eSATA, so I'd need a different enclosure (or maybe something like this).

I the enclosure route as I wanted the ability to expand capacity in the future beyond the 6TB I have now.

 

[ColdCase]

Yeah you can put the drives in a NAS type enclosure and plug it into your network. You can also plug your enclosure into a mac (a dedicated mini for example), plug the Mac into the network, and share the volume that way (thats what I do with 12TB RAID volume).

But what are you storing on the drive? If you intend to use that volume as a time machine backup destination, you should stick to apple products. Otherwise use something like CCC to backup. What is your backup plan for that volume?.

 

[rayward]

Yeah you can put the drives in a NAS type enclosure and plug it into your network. You can also plug your enclosure into a mac (a dedicated mini for example), plug the Mac into the network, and share the volume that way (thats what I do with 12TB RAID volume).

But what are you storing on the drive? If you intend to use that volume as a time machine backup destination, you should stick to apple products. Otherwise use something like CCC to backup. What is your backup plan for that volume?.

I want to use it for Time Machine backups exclusively (which is why I went plain JBOD rather than RAID), but I want to attach it to my Airport Extreme Basestation, which is in a different location to my Mac (and I am on a kick right now to eliminate external drives from my Mac). A Time Capsule isn't big enough as my ever-expanding media library is already over 2TB.

I used to have a WD Sharespace 4TB for this purpose, attached by ethernet to my AEBS, but the update to Lion (I think) bricked that from a TM perspective and WD never updated their firmware. Hence my preference to use a simple enclosure / HDD set-up to avoid, as far as possible, that happening again as well as giving me the option to feed in extra drives as needed.

 

[ColdCase]

Your getting beyond the needs of a typical household and what AEBS can easily support. Instead of trying to use an extreme, your best solution is to pick up a base mini and the $30 server package. Plug your enclosure and drives (Thunderbolt being best) and set it up as a mac server. Easily done and there are lots of on line help for you. Out it in the same room as your extreme.

Depending on how you set up your pair of drives it may not be possible to add another without reformatting the set. To do that you need to concatenate, not mirror.

There are several band aids that can get you by, but a mini server provided the scalability and growth potential you want (just add more drives) as well as Apple's time machine. You can also think about a NAS product and use CCC instead of timemachine. That can get costly too.

If you want to save money, the best solution is just to connect the drives to your computer, forget about the network.

 

[rayward]

Thanks for your detailed responses.

Your getting beyond the needs of a typical household and what AEBS can easily support. Instead of trying to use an extreme, your best solution is to pick up a base mini and the $30 server package. Plug your enclosure and drives (Thunderbolt being best) and set it up as a mac server. Easily done and there are lots of on line help for you. Out it in the same room as your extreme.

I might just have to do that...

Depending on how you set up your pair of drives it may not be possible to add another without reformatting the set. To do that you need to concatenate, not mirror.

Drives are currently concatenated but, even if I have to reformat to add extra capacity, that's ok as it's just a backup - almost entirely for my media. I do not need Time Machine's awesome history features, I'm just using it for convenience.

There are several band aids that can get you by, but a mini server provided the scalability and growth potential you want (just add more drives) as well as Apple's time machine. You can also think about a NAS product and use CCC instead of timemachine. That can get costly too.

If you want to save money, the best solution is just to connect the drives to your computer, forget about the network.

My bigger priority is to avoid having things attached to my Mac; I want to keep that space clean and uncluttered, hence the need to attach the backup drive to the network. I also like the idea of it being in another room to add an additional element of security.

 

[rayward]

Issue "solved". I tried to connect the enclosure to the AEBS via ethernet using a USB 3 hub with an ethernet port. That didn't work either.

I took the enclosure back, and bought a Buffalo Linkstation 441e that - unhelpful instructions aside - worked.

 

[matreya]

I took the enclosure back, and bought a Buffalo Linkstation 441e that - unhelpful instructions aside - worked.

That's because the 441e supports hardware RAID, whereas the Nexstar did not.