whats the best NAS for mac?

Please let us know how you play your music to your Apple TV from your NAS, with your iTunes turned off. My setup uses Home Sharing in iTunes in order to display the library contents on my Apple TV. I know the ReadyNAS has iTunes Streaming Server, but I never tried that with Apple TV.

I dont know if you can build a machine that consumes less power than NAS machines out there. Idea to have NAS running 24/7 can make a difference on power consumption and hydro bill.

Ryan,

Check out a product, Mac Mini -- it's a full fledge and is as small as NAS. It will have iTunes software and it can run 24/7 as a media streaming server.. It can also stream media off NAS via its shared folder if you prefer to seprate Mac Mini and NAS for where media should be stored in.

Thought I'd share a solution.

Thanks KibbyCabbit. I have been eyeballing this as my next solution along with the Pegasus Promise R6 thunderbolt drive. The R6 has low power at 78W when entire unit is up and running, which bests the RadyNAS at 85W. But when you factor a Mac Mini server too it's double that of the ReadyNAS. Performance, however, is about 10 times faster etween the Mini & the R6, but over gigabit Ethernet, it's about the same as my RadyNAS. So I'm looking down the road when I need to transfer 12 TBs from one drive to another. That's where the R6 will really pay off. Pus the ability to expand the storage from 12 TBs to 48 TBs by daisy-chaining 4 units together.

I think the only way they are going to get power down significantly from 78W would be to use SSDs rather than SATAs. At the moment that seems to be cost prohibitive, but that will change eventually.

My strategy is to hold out with my ReadyNAS for as long as I can tolerate my dwindling space. Performance slows as you surpass 80% capacity, and that's where I'm at, at the moment.

To build a system that consumes the send power is very easy. My Phoenix NAS consumes about 60w at full load. And for the iTunes support, I've never needed iTunes to be able to stream my stuff. I stream all my videos, music and pictures to my Roku from my NAS.

Ah, okay, I don't have a Roku, just an Apple TV and PS3, and it's Apple TV that requires a computer with iTunes on in order to see your library.

Hi Kibby - can you explain how you are using iphoto with your NAS - I was under the impression you can't do it with any real speediness.

Thanks.

Steve

I just bought a WD My Book Live NAS. Its cheap and seems to be a really capable device so far, runs a linux OS i think, and has simple permissions setup which is nice.

What would make it great is if I could figure out two annoyances. First, I cant seem to have spaces in name of the top level folders. I thought those types of file system problems were eliminated a decade ago.

Second issue. In the finder this server shows up twice, once as a shared network device, and once as a broken link to the backup folder. WD tech support forum says to ignore that instance, its just there so that Time Machine can connect to the share. What up wit that?

I believe my iPhoto Library is approx 33GB (mix of home videos and personal photos) now and the performance is still to my satisification (very fast) -- I upgraded DS107 to DS411+ because of that and I used wired solution. Wireless solution works but will take a while for iPhoto to complete loading the library.

Elxiliath, in this forum, we are assuming we have the legit media which requires valid ownership of the DRM'd iTunes media on their computer to be able to stream to Apple TV. I don't want to know where you got yours from. This kind of setup will require a computer running with iTunes with Home Sharing enabled.

Can Roku decode the DRM'd files if you are to share iTunes Library folder? Which app is that?

Pegasus Promise R6 thunderbolt drive is a very nice drive. Unfortuately, it isn't a NAS but you can always get Mac Mini and use it as NAS and have Pegasus plugged in. I would say your NAS is PEGASUS POWERED. 🙂

I'm upgrading from a Drobo FS (reboots often, is slow, and has become unreliable) and, based on the discussions in this thread, am debating between the Synology DS413 & DS412+. I have a small setup with 3 Macs, 2 PCs, and 1 Apple TV connected by an Airport Extreme. All devices are wireless at this time. I intend to start with 2 x 3TB drives and expand from there and possibly add in 4TB drives to expand storage (read mixed size drives). I'll be using the NAS as my primary storage for shared data: docs, pictures & video (Aperture & Picasa), music & movies (Apple TV & single Mac with iTunes). I will also use it for time machine for the Macs.

Any reasons why I should go with a DS412+ over the DS413?

good afternoon.

i'm a newbie in NAS an network issues. my english may not be the most correct so please bare with me. if i give too much details about anything it's just a consequence of my ignorance.

i own 2 Macbook Pro, an Hub from my cable tv provider, an HDD multimedia drive connected to the hub and to the TV, a TV connected to the hub and an AV receiver to drive my sorround system with a Blu-Ray, TV, cable box, Multimedia HDD connect to it.

i had a RAID 1 Windows 7 PC with 2 external disk backups. in the past i lost my data 2 times and i become a bit of a backup freak 🙂.

after reading some foruns and hundreds of opinions i'm thinking about buying a Synology 2 bay NAS in RAID 1 and keep the 2 external redundant disk backups (both USB3 and eSATA compatible) of the NAS.

all the system would be connected to an APC power stabilizer and filter and an independent UPS. i'm already using the APC with my TV and multimédia system.

i was thinking about buying the Synology 213+ or th 713+.

some questions:

why buy one or the other? in a day to day home use are they so different from one another? real, day to day practical advantages of the 713+ over the 213+?

file system: i need it to be fully compatible with MAC and Windows (sometimes some friends come over and most of them have PCs), i need to use files bigger than 4Gb so FAT32 is not an option. wich one should i use?

any sugestion on anything? 🙂

thank you all for you patience!

Good Day. I have read through this entire post as I am interested in NAS for my home network to support an iMac, 2 x Macbook Pros, a MacBook Air, and an aging Windows 7 PC. It appears that Synology is the preferred choice by many on this post. I'm now tyring to understand the differences between the Standard Business (e.g. DS412+), the Workgroups & Small Business (e.g. DS413), and the Personal & Home Office (e.g. DS413j) models and which I should purchase for my purposes. Any guideance on why I would choose from one product family over the other would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Generally the difference is in hardware performance (processor core and clock rate and memory size, please refer to specifications of respective models in Synology website). Number of bays decides number of RAID levels it can support, four-bay models (DS4xx) are good for almost all RAID levels. The suffix in model number go like this as far as performance is concerned: Plus > Regular > J. So it depends on how many connections/users/computers must be supported at all time and how long are you willing to wait for internal processing in the NAS for every operation. Most of the time, performance is limited by bandwidth of wireless network rather than the NAS when the connection is wrieless. Perhaps the J model should be avoided to ensure that the NAS is never the bottleneck for file transfer performance.

I set up my wireless network with Apple Airport Extreme base station (802.11n, 5 GHz radio band with bandwidth of at least 300 Mbps) and Synology DS212 NAS (2 TB x2 in RAID 0) connected to the base station directly through Cat6 Ethernet cable (no point using unreliable wireless connection). With just Mac/Windows file services running on DS212 and no extra package is required, it works very well as Time Machine backup device and NAS to two Sonos zone players (require CIFS/SMB file sharing protocol). All I have to do is transfer whole iTunes Music folder of 10,309 songs from my iMac to the NAS drive wirelessly. I have tried running iTunes server package on the NAS and playing songs through iTunes application on my iMac, it works as expected but pointless and incovenient to me. With all songs contained in NAS drive, I never have to turn on my iMac in order to appreciate music through any networked players such as Sonos or Squeezebox.

If you want comprehensive services from NAS product, go for NAS vendors whose only product is NAS but nothing else (such as Synology and Qnap). Also spend a little bit more on hard drives of enterprise grade rather than consumer grade (refer to Seagate website for details) for better reliability and 24x7 long-hour operation (though sleep mode can be enabled in all Synology NAS models).

Hello, I am looking to add a NAS to my network for as cheaply as possible while still having my data protected. I am pretty much a novice when it comes to NAS and RAID configurations so I'm not sure exactly how much storage space I need for what I am trying to accomplish. I apologize in advance for any dumb questions or statements. I currently have a 1.5 TB Seagate GoFlex portable drive that I have connected to my Airport Extreme that I use mostly for iTunes content which has about 200 GB of free space. I also have a WD My Book 2TB drive in RAID 0 that I use for Time Machine to back up my Macbook Pro (which has a 320GB hard drive with about 200 GB free) and the Seagate drive. In order to do this, I have to connect the My Book directly to my computer by Firewire 800. I have to disconnect the Seagate drive from my router and plug directly into my computer whenever I add something to it that I want to be backed up, as I have not been able to find a way to get time machine to back up that drive while it is shared on the network. I am looking for a NAS that will allow me to have my time machine backup, and also have space for my iTunes library and any other content I want to store externally. I am thinking I probably want to add an additional 1TB of space for iTunes content, photos, and home movies for total of 2.5 TB. I would like to have the data protected from one drive failing, so I believe I need a 4 bay system in RAID 5 configuration, however I'm not sure how much total space I actually need. I was thinking I would like to have the Time Machine partition be able to back up the partition with the iTunes library in case something was accidentally deleted, but I'm not sure that is actually possible. If it is not possible, the size of the Time Machine backup partition could be significantly smaller, so I would need much less space. I am thinking that if TM will not back up the other partition, I would buy 4 1TB drives and set them up in RAID 5 with 3TB total storage and use around 500 GB for TM and 2.5 TB for all other files. I could also connect the MyBook to the NAS as additional storage. Does this make sense? If so, how "safe" is my data in that setup? I do use Crashplan for cloud backup of everything in case of worst case scenario.