Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Which NAS is right for me?

carrollf

carrollf

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 8, 2007
225
0
Ireland
Hi
I am looking to get a 4TB NAS for home that I will connect via Ethernet to my Airport Extreme BS. I use a MBP and my girlfriend uses a Windows XP laptop. I want to store my entire iTunes library on this NAS drive and allow both of us to access it to play media. I would also like my MBP to auto backup to the NAS using Time Machine and my girlfriends Win XP laptop to be able to drag-and-drop files to it (read/write). I will probably set it up as RAID 1 mirrored.
I have looked at the Iomega StoreCenter ix2 4TB NAS but it has mixed reviews...most complain about performance of wireless backup and the interface itself. I am not sure what the alternatives are? Please let me know your experiences.I am looking at the $500 mark as a budget.
Any advice much appreciated.

Thanks
 
Thanks

Do I have to format the drive in a certain way to allow my MBP and the Windows laptop to both read/write. I am new to this...
 
no, the drive format doesn't matter on network storage.

the only thing that sees the format of the drive is whatever you're using to share it. You just need to make sure that device is capable of sharing to both windows and mac, which everything should be.
 
Hi all,

I've got all the hardware and am about to do the exact same thing here myself. The only trouble is I'm unsure the best way to go about this. I have a MBP, Win7 laptop, two iPhone 4's, an iPod Nano (3rd gen) and an iPad 2 to contend with.
Currently I have the latest iTunes installed on an old P4 desktop and every apple device syncs to that. What I want to do is move my entire iTunes library to my new 2TB NAS and have all my apple devices sync to that via my MBP.

Do either of you know if this possible and if so the best way to go about it?
 
Just don't keep everything solely on the NAS.

raid.png
 
Your network throughput is going to be your limiting factor, not the speed of your hard drives....so - no - you don't really need to go all out on high speed SATA drives. 5400 RPM drives would be fast enough in RAID 0 and run cooler. Don't forget - if you get a 2 bay NAS, you can only run JBOD or RAID 0 to get 4TB capacity....you will not have any redundancy. Using RAID 1 will cut your usable capacity to 2TB with two 2TB drives installed because one is a mirror of the other.
 
Just to be sure I'm making the right decision...

The DS411SLIM is actually cheaper than the DS211+ and has 2 more bays!! WOuld this be better option? What are PROS and CONS of each?
 
carrollf said:
Just to be sure I'm making the right decision...

The DS411SLIM is actually cheaper than the DS211+ and has 2 more bays!! WOuld this be better option? What are PROS and CONS of each?
Click to expand...

You'll be paying more for drives with the slim. It takes 2.5" laptop drives, not 3.5" desktop drives. Plus the slim only has a 4GB maximum capacity. You can compare the specs of the machines here.

Plus, what's said before, the limiting factor is a combination of network capacity and RAID overhead. On my 411j, I get ~35MBps write and up to ~70MBps read. But mine only has 128MB RAM and a 1.2GHz processor, so yours will be considerably faster. Edit: Assuming you have a gigabit network connection.
 
Last edited:
I have my DS211j backuped to an external USB HDD from time to time and keep it offsite. Next step will be a remote DS with rsync

First time machine backup will take some time, but the next incremental backups are fast enough. I dont really care about the speed...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back