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NAS Drive for Mac

U

unclewiggles

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 17, 2007
1
0
Hi there,

I need some advice.

I want to get myself a NAS for my network so that I can access it on my mac/pc while in the house and also via the internet when I am away from my local network. Ive been looking at the western digital world disk (i think its called that) but it says that it wont work with mac.

Can any one give me some advice on what I should be looking for?

The most inportant feature that I need it to have is that I can access it remotely

Many thanks,

Tom

Mac Spec:

Mac book
Mac OS X 10.4.10
@ GHz Intel core duo
2Gb ram
60 Gd HHD
 
unclewiggles said:
Hi there,

I need some advice.

I want to get myself a NAS for my network so that I can access it on my mac/pc while in the house and also via the internet when I am away from my local network. Ive been looking at the western digital world disk (i think its called that) but it says that it wont work with mac.

Can any one give me some advice on what I should be looking for?

The most inportant feature that I need it to have is that I can access it remotely

Many thanks,

Tom

Mac Spec:

Mac book
Mac OS X 10.4.10
@ GHz Intel core duo
2Gb ram
60 Gd HHD
Click to expand...

What about an Airport Extreme Base Station with an attached USB air disk? Currently some problems with the AEBS firmware but that should be fixed shortly :)
 
unclewiggles said:
I want to get myself a NAS for my network so that I can access it on my mac/pc while in the house and also via the internet when I am away from my local network.
Click to expand...
If price is less of a concern for you than most, I highly recommend the Infrant (er, Netgear now) ReadyNAS. They come in diskless configurations, two drives, or four drives.. up to 3 TB of storage space. I filled mine with four 400GB SATA Seagates that were on sale recently, configured in RAID-5 for 1.2 TB with a parity drive for any failure.

Sure, it's way overkill for most people, but we're using 5 machines to access the shares, and often do remote work where we need access to those files - Mostly photography shoots. The gigabit Ethernet is a definite necessity for NAS devices as 10/100 would just be too dang slow.

I fully realize that I'm suggesting something that will cost somewhere in the range of $1200, but in my situation, my data is worth it. My other option would be to build a linux RAID box and the cost/benefit ratio is not that much better than the ReadyNAS - Not to mention all the time it takes to build, service and update.

unclewiggles said:
The most inportant feature that I need it to have is that I can access it remotely
Click to expand...

Here's where a linux box setup as a NAS server would be pretty helpful, but you can do it with a ReadyNAS with only minor setup. Essentially, we've opened SSH on our router to point at a machine that is always running. You can use your SSH connection to tunnel traffic to the internal ReadyNAS IP address, or tunnel traffic to VNC/Remote Desktop running on another machine (and access your data that way). It requires that you always have a computer on accepting SSH connections.

In my opinion, there are 4 factors you need to prioritize before getting external storage: Price, Data Integrity, Speed, and Size. I say the ReadyNAS is a 3 on price, 9 on integrity, 5 on speed, and 9 on size.

HTH. If you have any questions, I can help out a bit.

I also forgot to mention that the ReadyNAS does SMB/CIFS (windows file sharing), AFP (apple file sharing) and NFS (Unix file sharing), all of which OS X can connect to.. Oh and a web interface as well.
 
Here is another vote for the Infrant ReadyNAS NV, which serves my Mac/PC home network well. :)
 
Well, I have the AEBS (not gigabit) with 320GB disk connected. 2 working on the file same time. Works "ok" but remote access is somewhat slow and I find myself rebooting the station once in a while. Not productive enough. And frankly, thru USB, backups are soooooooo slow.
 
Infrant definitely... especially with their 4.0 firmware coming out shortly! I have 1.5TB in an X-Raid 4 disk configuration accessible by AFP, SMB, NFS. Performance over gigabit ethernet is pretty good 30MB/s.
 
Another vote for the ReadyNAS NV+

I connected my PC and iMac wirelessly to the NAS, found it instantly. Not a single issue with it. It could almost be an apple product :eek:

I didn't see anyone mention this, but you can setup a single media partition as an iTunes server, uPnP server and Media server. Great if you have an Apple TV, a slingbox or any other set of streaming devices.
 
chelsel said:
Infrant definitely... especially with their 4.0 firmware coming out shortly! I have 1.5TB in an X-Raid 4 disk configuration accessible by AFP, SMB, NFS. Performance over gigabit ethernet is pretty good 30MB/s.
Click to expand...

Have you installed the beta versions of their 4.0 firmware? I'm tempted to try it because of the remote SSH access, but I rely too much on my NAS to experiment.
 
SansDigital MN2L and iTunes/Bonjour/NFS servers?

I bought a SansDigital MN2L NAS, configured it via the web interface, and I can see the SMB shares on my Mac (MacBook Pro running latest Tiger update) but I can't see any Bonjour shares, and I can't access the NFS server on the NAS (I get "authentication error" even for NFS exports that are supposed to be available to everyone). When I try to access the shared library in iTunes, I get an error saying:

The shared library "HPW_music_box" is
not responding (-3260)

This also happens if I try to access the NAS via iTunes in WinXP/Pro.

BTW - anyone else think that having the NAS append "_music_box" is just plain annoying?
 
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