whats the best NAS for mac?

I haven't read about Drive having a 5 yr life span , is this offical ? do Drive manufactors state this.. ? you are getting me worried I have drive which are 10+ yrs old I use as back ups etc...

For more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_failure

Seagate posted a really good article about MTBF for Enterprise-Entry HDDs (also applies for consumer-grade):

http://enterprise.media.seagate.com/2010/04/inside-it-storage/diving-into-mtbf-a nd-afr-storage-reliability-specs-explained/

FYI, Time Capsule uses server-grade AKA enterprise-entry HDDs which is rated much longer than consumer-entry HDDs.

For better practice, put your files in your computer and let backup make copies. I wouldn't put files in backup HDD that isn't available in my computer's HDD. That way you can replace whichever dies first.

P.S. Don't worry about when will 10 yr old HDD die. Just make sure your data is in two places. 🙂

I've always lived by, "it's not a matter of IF it will fail, but rather a question of WHEN it will fail".

If you take the point of view that your drive will fail (and probably when you least need it to) then you will prepare yourself for the inevetable fact that all drives fail eventually. Even enterprise class drives are prone to early termination, but the odds are heavily against that. Measure your risk (what would it take to replace all your data from scratch) and take the necessary precauctions. With any good RAID system you should be able to monitor the disk SMART data and that can give you telltale signs that a drive is wavering or about to fail. For example, look for number of errors. A high number could mean your drive is just about to expire and this may buy you enough time to back up your data.

I've had two different RAID systems and both have had complete failures. One was a RAID 6 and one was a RAID 5. The first failure taught me how important it is to have a mirror backup of the data. I was able to rebuild the crucial files, but it was a lot of work. The second failure was rather uneventful because I had a complete mirror of the RAID 5. I replaced the dead drives and then recopied all the data back onto my primary RAID from the mirrored RIAD. It took 2.5 days to copy, but everything was restored completely.

Ask yourself, "What are the risks vs. rewards?" There is high risk, but relatively little reward (until you have a complete data loss)

ADVICE: Measure the risk of failure against your ability to recover that lost data. Then buy the best drive you can afford. Then make a regularly updated duplicate of your most crucial data. Then you'll have peace of mind.

And you leave your optimistic thinking to fortune telling, the horse tack and lucky dice!

A lot of really great suggestions here. I've been piecing together how to get all the software on my mac to integrate in a NAS set up. For what it's worth, I would strongly recommend the Synology Brand for a NAS setup. There are other options out there, but I've been really really happy with their product. There are multiple NAS products Synology sells, but I went with the following: Synology DiskStation 2-Bay

I thought the reviews were particularly helpful as there are so many different ways that people are using these. All mac house or mixed PC/Mac houses all seem to be happy.

GREAT thread! thanx to all who posted, made finding a solution so much easier.

personally I've plumbed for the Synology DS213j with a mirrored pair of 2TB (cost, redundancy, personal cloud)

what I now want to know is, whats the best way to work with my NAS and my iMac?

having created some of the default folders you normally see in your user home:

Documents

Movies

Music

Pictures

Sites

and having copied the data over,

do I simply delete my local versions off my iMac and replace them with an ALIAS to my NAS versions?

or

do I have to leave the local folder name and then put an alias at the sub level? (ugly)

or what? 🙂

TIA

If you're confident that your NAS is sufficiently redundant, then there is no need to keep a local copy on your computer. Just create some folder aliases for easy access.

You also might want to write an Automator script to auto-mount the NAS folders when you login. For me this is helpful, because my iTunes library is on my NAS and if I launch iTunes with the NAS unmounted, then iTunes reverts to it's default file location in your home folder. To fix, simply quit iTunes, mount the NAS and relaunch iTunes, then it will point back to the NAS location automatically.

I suspect iPhoto would work the same way. Otherwise, navigating to your NAS in the finder is like navigating to any local folder and you would work directly off the server rather than your home folders.

Performance is really not an issue unless you are editing 1080P video in Final Cut and your files are all on your NAS. It may slow down significantly and I recommend working locally for that or getting a dedicated USB 3 / Thunderbolt drive if more storage capacity is needed. You'll want to then backup those files to your NAS manually, or through Time Machine (pointing to your NAS), or through some other sync app like Synk Pro.

This has been a great discussion and very informative.

I'm getting ready to make some decisions and migrate away from my old trusty windows home server so this is all very relevent.

The thing that I'm still a little hung up on (for me), is why use a NAS at all? I heavily contemplating buying a new imac with a lot of onboard staorage and then just getting a DAS (like the Promise Tbold array etc).

No if I can get sufficient stoarege from a DAS and have congiured in RAID 1, it seems to me that I'm accomplishing everything I need: Complete redunancy (assuming I also back up the imac to the array or my time mac capsule), and maximum accesabiltiy. What is the downside to DAS? It seems to me that as long as this imac is always on, then that also solves the issue of other computers being able to access files/media.

In addition to the above, I use Crashplan offsite backup. So if there's a physical failure or disater, the data is still protected.

I would love any thoughts/feedback. I'm sure I'm missing something.

You are onthe right track here. DAS vs. NAS really depends client connectivity, or how many simultaneous connections to your data. For single users, a DAS has superior performance ( Promise RAID is crazy fast). When used with a Mac you can achieve NAS-like functionality, but you'll need to leave your Mac on all the time.

Let's say you are using your Mac and a network client also wants to access your content on the DAS. They have to use your computer's resources to get to the data. For small tasks, this one client is not too disruptive, but as you increase the number of connected clients, your user experience becomes compromised and your computer slows down.

NAS are regluar computers that are optimized for interfacing specifically over a network, whether it be local (LAN) or wide (WAN). They include features that help you run them for this primary purpose, e.g.,

• diagnostics
• control over data permissions per user (who gets to see what), shared vs. private
• integrated backup options
• streaming media (audio, video, & pictures)
• shared print server
• setting limits on client storage size and speed
• settings to automate backup & on/off

Synology, for example, also includes

• cloud computing capability
• virtualization
• web hosting, FTP
• Hybrid RAID for dissimilar drive capacities
• mobile apps for accessing content remotely
• VPN
• mail, contacts, etc.
• overall, very stable

NASs are also fairly efficient connsuming power. My Synology DS1813+ 8-bay NAS only uses 80W when running and 30 W in standby mode. Where my MacPro idles at 85W and typically runs 150-250W when performing multiple tasks.

One caveat, I have an Apple TV and must run my Mac to access the content when I watch a movie through it. My Netgear ReadyNAS and Synology have an iTunes server option that works when running iTunes on another Mac, but I haven't found that it works with Apple TV yet. Maybe there is a way to do this, I'm not sure.

So if you are only one person using the RAID, then a DAS is probably the way to go. You could even get OS X Server if you wanted to add NAS-like features to your network (I'm not too savvy with that approach). A Promise RAID would certainly give you the speed and I think it's also rather low in power consumption.

Very informative discussion. I am about to purchase a Synology NAS, probably the 213j or 213air. I willa ccess the NAS with an 80211.n network, either over an Airport Extreme or a standard Verizion FiOS modem/router.

The NAS will be used to support one MacBookAir (2 users) for Time Machine backup, iTunes and iPhoto libraries, and video streaming to a networked TV along with a few mobile devices.

I'm wondering about download performace when purchasing music from iTunes with the actual library and Media folder on the NAS.

I'm also wondering about backing up the NAS files occasionaly to an external drive that can be kept offsite or in a fireproof safe.

Thoughts.

Thanks in advance.

I switched to two Synology DS1813+ from two ReadyNAS Pioneer Pro 2 three months ago and have been pleased with the results.

Speed

Using wired ethernet rather than WiFi will defintely give you superior performance in speed, but you may not need all that speed.

• For streaming most media, you will not notice a lag. If you want to watch a full sized streaming BluRay, you may have some hiccups because it's a large data stram. Plus, the further away you are from the wireless router, the slower the performance.
• Music streaming is generally unaffected by using a wireless router.
• Wirelessly downloading files via iTunes Store has a negligible decrease in speed since the content is likely throttled either by your ISP or iTunes.
• The real issue is moving large files on and off your Synology. 5+ GB files will take noticeably longer over WiFi than wired. So for backing up large data sets or moving files from an old drive to the Synology, use ethernet.
• Folder icons and thumbnails may also be slow to load over WiFi, but once they are rendered, you usually don't have to worry about that again.
• The number of people connected to your Synology could also slow down your connection.

Media Folder

Only organize your files in the Synology NAS media folder if you plan on installing the Media Station apps that come with it, (Video, Music, Photos). Otherwise, if you are using iTunes, then keep that structure intact but on the NAS, and just ignore the Media folders entirely. You can use the DiskStation Manager (DSM) to index media from specific folders for use with Synology's mobile apps (DS Video, DS Audio, etc.), without destroying or duplicating your iTunes content.

Backup

For this I belive you can use the backup program in DSM to backup to a USB drive that's plugged directly into the NAS. This should be the optimal arrangement, but you could also plug your drive into your computer and manually drag and drop files from your NAS to your hard drive. The best method is to automate a regular backup so you don't have to think about it. The 213j has RAID 1 so you could have an internal copy of all your data. But keeping a copy offsite is a smart idea. I suffered a complete data loss from a fire. And even though it was a RAID 6, it was totaly vulnerable to the water damage from the fire fighters.

Thanks, Ryan. Very informative.

What do you know about the speed difference in processors re the 213j and 213+? That much of a diff for things like photos, thumbnails and music?

Interesting re the Media Folder. I do use iTunes and iPhoto now, and will continue to use iTunes. But I may want to also use the audio and video with the Synology Media apps as I find iTunes laking in some features. Match works well except for some special mono recordings I have. Are you saying I can to index and map folders so I can use both?

Do you use Synology's hybrid RAID?

Thanks again.

For longevity I would go with the DS213 (doesn't look like they make the DS213+) because it is Dual Core and has USB 3 and eSata which are significantly faster at transfering data than the DS213j's USB 2. Down the road, this speed will be welcome. Dual Core will be more helpful when using the NAS while it's running backup or maintenace or if you have more than one person accessing it. If you decide to use it as a web server, it will be more reliable, but only marginally. If it were me, I would spend the extra $100 to get the DS213.

Indexing Media

In DSM, you can index specific folders to match specific types of media, music, photos, etc.

Here's a tutorial from Synology. Start half way down the page at "4. Configure Audio Station" http://www.synology.com/support/tutorials_show.php?q_id=499&lang=us

You'll need to do this if you want to use DS Video or DS Audio on your mobile device. You can also install Apps in DSM that play this media. You don't have to use DSM's media folders. I tried activating these folders, but ultimately prefered to keep everything managed by iTunes and point iTunes to the server folder on my NAS. In order for iTunes to always access this, however, you must have the server mounted on your computer before launching iTunes. Otherwise, iTunes will get confused and point back to the default location.

Many friends bought the J-series after I suggested them to try out Synology brand. They loved it but returned them and got either the plus series or non-J series for the performance.

It's important to decide which performance you need (ie. how many people will access to it at the same time, how fast do you want the NAS to re-index the media files, and how fast you want your website to load (like WordPress)).

J = Budget

Regular = Standard

Plus = Performance

Good hunting. 🙂

Jason

I have a 213+ arriving tomorrow. What's the best initial setup for a mac only house? Is there a way to make the whole system appletalk and sahreable? Or is it really better to make individual folders shareable?

I thiink I'm going to use this opportunity to transition away from iPhoto. I plan to do an export of all the photos and put them and the iPhoto library on the NAS for the time being while we get comfortable with another storage method.

This raises the question of NAS organization. How do folks handle this with Macs as they transition to using both Mac and the Synology NAS apps?

Thanks.

Fritz

Here's my current setup.

2011 Mac Mini - Samsung 840 SSD & 16GB RAM(Main Desktop)

MacBook Air

4 - Apple TV 2's ( Jailbroken to play all types of media files from NAS)

Synology 211J with (2) Western Digital 1TB - RE4 Drives installed (25GB left of free space)

My Question is, Obviously i need to upgrade storage, what are my best options? My buddy just gave me his OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 with 4 of the same Western Digital 1TB RE4 Drives. I could just plug that into the Synology NAS via USB and play media files off it, or should I connect it directly to the Mac Mini and start a new way of having everything shared and played. I should note that i dont use itunes to play media files (they're all avi's and such) I dont really have the time to convert all to itunes format.

Should I look for another NAS unit? I would like to be able to access everything remotely as well.