Hey guys,
I was wondering what the most reliable method for external storage is. To clarify, by reliability I don't mean fault tolerance but rather highest accessibility to the content, i.e. fastest access/connection/mounting time.
I have an iMac that I love, but the tiny 320GB HDD is not enough for my storage needs. To solve this external storage is the only option to hold all of my stuff. I currently have a QNAP NAS with 4x WD640 RAID5 array. It works splendidly and holds all of my podcasts, movies, manual backups, time machine backups, etc.
Lately I've been using the QNAP via iSCSI over Gigabit and it's served very well except that the globalSAN iSCSI initiator is not very Snow Leopard friendly (yet at least - v4b is good but needs some work). It takes about 1-3 minutes to connect to and mount the disks after the system boots up, which gets annoying as I can't open iTunes or do much until it mounts. Once in a while iTunes/Finder/Spotlight locks up if the drive gets disconnected or lost, which requires a hard power off and gets annoying rather quickly.
Before using iSCSI I tried SMB and AppleTalk but both of which didn't seem to connect in a reliable manner. Sometimes it does, sometimes it forgets to connect, etc -- even if I used 3rd party software to automate the connection at login or used the Login Items built in to OS X.
I have considered getting a DroboPro which uses either FW800 or iSCSI (I'm not going to bother with USB). I know FW800 is fast but I'm not sure how reliable it is. Would FW/SMB/AppleTalk/Bonjour be a more Mac-friendly alternative for iSCSI, or is iSCSI more reliable than the FW/SMB/AppleTalk/Bonjour?
Cheers,
-robodude666
I was wondering what the most reliable method for external storage is. To clarify, by reliability I don't mean fault tolerance but rather highest accessibility to the content, i.e. fastest access/connection/mounting time.
I have an iMac that I love, but the tiny 320GB HDD is not enough for my storage needs. To solve this external storage is the only option to hold all of my stuff. I currently have a QNAP NAS with 4x WD640 RAID5 array. It works splendidly and holds all of my podcasts, movies, manual backups, time machine backups, etc.
Lately I've been using the QNAP via iSCSI over Gigabit and it's served very well except that the globalSAN iSCSI initiator is not very Snow Leopard friendly (yet at least - v4b is good but needs some work). It takes about 1-3 minutes to connect to and mount the disks after the system boots up, which gets annoying as I can't open iTunes or do much until it mounts. Once in a while iTunes/Finder/Spotlight locks up if the drive gets disconnected or lost, which requires a hard power off and gets annoying rather quickly.
Before using iSCSI I tried SMB and AppleTalk but both of which didn't seem to connect in a reliable manner. Sometimes it does, sometimes it forgets to connect, etc -- even if I used 3rd party software to automate the connection at login or used the Login Items built in to OS X.
I have considered getting a DroboPro which uses either FW800 or iSCSI (I'm not going to bother with USB). I know FW800 is fast but I'm not sure how reliable it is. Would FW/SMB/AppleTalk/Bonjour be a more Mac-friendly alternative for iSCSI, or is iSCSI more reliable than the FW/SMB/AppleTalk/Bonjour?
Cheers,
-robodude666