whats the best NAS for mac?

I'm using a Macbook Pro as a server Mac (24/7) and a QNAP TS-569 with 5x 3TB WD Red HD.

I have been using this for around 1 year now also without a single problem.

It just runs 24/7, cool and clean. Everything works as it should 😉 Couldn't be more happy with it.

But i have the same problem now. Almost full 12TB of files and i'm so afraid of loosing something.

I heard so many bad stories when people are updating firmware in NAS, QNAP, Syn, WD etc.

Things happen and the disk are having errors and other weird thing. So i need a extra NAS

only for backup/clone.

I would hate my self for not being ready if something happen. RAID is not 100% safe.

Very informative thread here. I have a 2009 Mac and just installed a Synology DS1512+ and I have copied all of my photos and movies over to the DS. Can anyone point me in the right direction of how to properly set up itunes, imovie, and iphoto to "point" to the files on the DS?

I want to make sure I have this done correctly before I erase the files on the Mac HD. If you can't tell, I am an extreme newbie here...

The Synology DSM has a feature for you to turn on the media folders for music, video and pictures. I choose not to use these with my Mac since it uses it's own file structure to maintain the database. If you have your files already in these folders, then you should be able to link them in iTunes, but you won't want to "Keep iTunes Folder Organized" and won't want to "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library". This DSM folder structure is really for use with DSM and not with other third party sofware. In fact if you want to use the Synology media apps for your mobile device, you don't need to organize your files with these folders either. DSM allows you to index specifc folders that have this media. You have to manually set this up in DSM, but it's rather easy to do. 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

I recommend you leverage Apple's organizing system for both music & videos, as well as your iPhoto database. Just be sure to add any music through your iTunes app rather than dragging and dropping to the server folder directly, so iTunes can catalog and index the media. Since my ecosystem is all Apple, I benefit from "Keep iTunes Folder Organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" checked.

Setting up iTunes

• In the iTunes preferences set the iTunes Media folder location to the folder on your NAS that contains your media. As long as the NAS is mounted on your desktop, it will read and write to this remote location.
• If your media is in the same folder structure that iTunes organized it, then once you point to it, it should be good to go.

• If not, then delete delete all your media in iTunes, but do not delete the original files.
• Select the files in iTunes, select the Delete key. It will give you a popup window with "Do you want to delete the selected TV show, or keep it in the iTunes Media folder?"
• Select "Keep File". It deletes it from iTunes, but not off your Mac.
• From your NAS folder with the media, drag-n-drop a test file onto your iTunes window. It will move the file into an organized iTunes folder structure on the NAS. Since all your files are already on the NAS, then it doesn't have to rewrite the files, just moves them into the appropriate folder structure. If all is set correctly, then you can proceed with draging-n-dropping your entire library to iTunes. This could take a bit of time depending on the size of your library.
• The typical folder structure iTunes creates is Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\ [and then Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, etc]

If you do not have the Share mounted on your Mac desktop, iTunes will rest this location to the default location in your local Music folder in your Home folder. This becomes an issue when auto download is enabled and your NAS is not mounted. This really is no big deal, just a nuisance. Quit iTunes, Mount the Share, open iTunes and go to the preferences to confirm that the remote location is now set back to it's original setting. At least this way you don't have to reset this again, which would cause a reindex of all your files.

To make sure your NAS share is mouted before you launch iTunes, try creating a simple Automator app that mounts your NAS when you start up your computer. It should still stay mounted when the computer goes to sleep.

Since the NAS is networked, I can pull up my entire library on my Apple TV, or on any of my Apple devices. For Apple TV to work, however, the Mac with your iTunes library must be turned on and connected with your NAS. Apple TV reads from your iTunes database file to display all the content, rather than scan the entire library. This is something I wish Apple would change, but it keeps their customers locked in to their iTunes ecosystem and not something they will be giving up anytime soon.

Setting up iPhoto

I don't have my library on my NAS but here is what I found out, https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2685974

Unless the NAS is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) you will not be able to run the iPhoto library on it

If it is then Moving the iPhoto library is safe and simple - quit iPhoto and drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity to the external drive - depress the option key and launch iPhoto using the "select library" option to point to the new location on the external drive - fully test it and then trash the old library on the internal drive (test one more time prior to emptying the trash)

And be sure that the External drive is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) (iPhoto does not work with drives with other formats) and that it is always available prior to launching iPhoto

And backup soon and often - having your iPhoto library on an external drive is not a backup and if you are using Time Machine you need to check and be sure that TM is backing up your external drive

LN

You should consider going RAID 5 in the near future. This will provide a decent amount of redundancy against a drive failure. My setup is more like a RAID 10, two RAID 5's with the second one a direct mirror of the first. I chose this configuration after I had a complete failure of a RAID 6 NAS. I went with the Synology DS1812+ primarily for the scalability in the future. It will expand from a 28 TB NAS to a 60TB NAS with the addition of two DX513s. I easily blew through my 9TB READYNAS and expect to need the extra space within the year. The downside to this much storage is transferring all that content to the next generation of NAS eventhough it has USB 3, it will still take a long time (like 48 hrs nonstop).

Plugging your external drives into the NAS will make it available via ethernet and WiFi, but if you only have 1 computer, it's a mute point. I'd say plug those directly into your computer. With the MacMini, all the ports go through a single bus, so speed isn't going to improve one way over the other.

I want to mention that you can have file structure created/managed by iTunes in Music folder (there's performance difference whenether if you're connected via wired or wifi). You can have DSM to re-index the contents. They will appear in Plex/DLNA/DS Audio exactly like if the files you put in Music folder manually.

Ryan,

I have been reading your informative posts and thinking about this as I get ready to move my movie library to NAS, and am struck that your current approach is a lot like belt + suspenders + elastic + epoxy. Does your data change that much that this seems necessary, or is it just because it's something available to you? I feel my movie library would be static enough that I could put a 213+ in place, make the entire thing available, and just plug a couple external drives into the back that were used strictly for backup on a nightly basis (which wouldn't change all that often). I love the notion of getting the data onto a NAS, but wonder if a duplicated RAID 5 is convenience-based redundant redundancy, or if your data is so live that you want this, or is it simply a function of having had things fail too many times? I'm not asking in a critical way at all, I'm just curious as to why for understanding's sake. A setup such as you have would cost a lot to basically keep what I think is four copies of the data.

I'm new to Synology NAS. Just bought a DS213+ with two 4 TB Western Digital drives. I want it as a superior RAID backup, mostly for TIME MACHINE on our Macs but also to store the huge photo collection (I'm an amature photographer and shoot a LOT of photos in RAW format - very large). We have one iMAC used by my wife, 1 MacBook Air used by my daughter, on PC used by my son, and my MacBook Pro (running Mavericks - others using older OS).

I believe I have the NAS setup correctly now, and have loaded the apps AUDIO, PHOTO, SURVALLENCE (bought 1 camer - future project), CLOUD STN.

I have run into four issues/questions so far and wonder if this forum could help me out, as I am stuck and not getting much from the Synology site so far.

1. When I setup my wife as a USER on her iMAC, the first thing I wanted to do was switch the TIME MACHINE backups from going to the small external drive she has connected directly, to the NAS. The first thing I found was when I logged the NAS from her iMAC as her, then clicked TIME MACHINE to switch drive to use, the only choices were the current external drive that is direct connected, and on the NAS, only the folder "photo" was available. I did not think we would want her TIME MACHINE backups to go to "photo", so I went back to the DSM in her iMAC (logged in as her, a user) and created a new folder in her HOME folder. What I next found is that, as a USER not in the admin user group, she had no access to CONTROL PANEL to add this new folder to the TIME MACHINE folder list. I went back to my MacBOOK PRO as the admin, I went to select this new folder I created on her HOME folder, but it was not there. After trying everything I can think of for day, the only thing I can get to work is to create a SHARED folder, which then appears as a TIME MACHINE folder option, and then TIME MACHINE works on ther iMAC. The problem I see is I can set the privaleges for that folder for only her to see (Since I dont want any user to be able to access, and potential mess up, another's backup files), but when I do that, it seems to allow only her to access ANY of the shared folders. In other words, I cant seem to set the privaleges for just that folder. I suspect I have set up time machine wrong, or perhaps the DSM is designed to allow all users access to folders used as TIME MACHINE backup folders? That does not seem right to me. Can you someone chime in here with the proper way to setup TIME MACHINE for multiple users such that one user cannot access another user's backup folder?
2. I installed Photo Station, but I can only seem to access it from either my admin account. When I try to launch it from my wife's iMAC, it says it cannot access that site. What is the trick/setup for me to get this to work?
3. In general, my assumption is I dont want to put any of my users in the "default system admin users group", as that would give them access to all the setting and everyone else's folders. Is this correct? I could us a tutorial on how to setup 4 separate users such that they have privacy on what they put on the NAS.
4. When I log in, I keep getting an error message from JAVA telling me the certificate is not valid and will not be accepted in the future. I used the 'self certificate' option, as I dont know how to apply for one from a CA agency. Is this a major issue, and is it setting me up for malicious attacks? My assumption is since it is just being used by my immediate family, this is not a big deal. Could use more on this point.

I'm sure I will have a million more questions, as I am finding the DSM HELP a bit limited, but these are the HOT items for now.

Appreciate any help anyone can give in advance,

Mike

Mike

I cannot help you other than re your Q1, there is a Synology tutorial explaining how to setup a Synology NAS with time machine. Strikes me that you have not set things up quite in that manner - so might be worth a read althought I uspect you may have found that tutorial in the interim

I am in late pre-purchase phase looking to get a very similar config for more or less the same home environement. imac, mbp, ipads and several PCs. Aim is to setup 2 x time machine backup regimes to it. Several Acronis TI backups for the PCs. In addition serve our faimily photo albums from it to the family devices.

Planning to get a DS214+ with two 4TB WD Reds. How have you got on setting up. Did you sort out the 4 issues above?

Also how quite/noisy is the DS213+. I am upgrading from a 7 year old 4 bay Infrant readynas partly because it is so noisy.

John James4 wrote:

Ryan,

I have been reading your informative posts and thinking about this as I get ready to move my movie library to NAS, and am struck that your current approach is a lot like belt + suspenders + elastic + epoxy. Does your data change that much that this seems necessary, or is it just because it's something available to you? I feel my movie library would be static enough that I could put a 213+ in place, make the entire thing available, and just plug a couple external drives into the back that were used strictly for backup on a nightly basis (which wouldn't change all that often). I love the notion of getting the data onto a NAS, but wonder if a duplicated RAID 5 is convenience-based redundant redundancy, or if your data is so live that you want this, or is it simply a function of having had things fail too many times? I'm not asking in a critical way at all, I'm just curious as to why for understanding's sake. A setup such as you have would cost a lot to basically keep what I think is four copies of the data.

I can appreciate your opinion on my setup and it's not for everyone. The type of data I store is critically important and I'm constantly moving 100s of GBs daily/weekly on and off. I chose this setup (2 - Synology DS1813+ 8-bay NASs, both RAID 5 where 1 is mirroring the other [pseudo RAID 10]) to ensure I can keep my data intact if/when there is a complete failure to one of the machines, and allows me to get back up running in a minimal amount of time. I also don't have to wait for the failed RAID to restripe a new drive in a partial failure.

Again, this is the most flexible and reliable solution for me my situation. I need the 24 TBs the DS1813+ can accommodate and I like being able to buy the expandable storage (DX513) units as my data grows beyond 24 TBs. The video work I do demands a lot of storage and with 4k becoming more a reality, I doubt 24 TBs will cut it for me for long. But for the average person with a large photo library, impressive music library and decent HD video library, then a 4 or 6-bay RAID would probably be sufficient.

What I think it all comes down to is the amount of risk you are willing to expose yourself to vs. the amount of money/time/storage/wattage you can get away with. I operate with the forethought that my NAS will fail eventually, so having two NAS that mirror one another is an insurance policy that minimizes the risk to almost zero. I have had partial and complete failrures and they are no fun to recover from. I also keep a couple new harddrives ready in case there is a single disk failure. That actually happened to me 1 month after I bought and setup my DS1813+. A band new drive, with only 10% capacity used, simply failed. RAID 5 means that its okay as long as you can replace the drive soon enough, which I did, and it took about 24 hours to restripe back to normal. A previous NAS I had (a 6-bay) had a drive fail and in the process of restriping it, another drive failed and killed all that data. Thankfully, I had another 6-bay NAS mirroring it, so I was able to get back up and running immediately and then recopied the data back to the first NAS once the drives were replaced. Of course, I didn't have any drives on hand at the time, so I had to order more and that took a few days. Add to that rebuilding the volume took another day or so.

Please don't feel pressured to go this way. It's expensive and there is a fair amount of time to invest in the setup. Just know that when it's correct and complete, it's a very good solution for long-term storage with minimal involvement thereafter. I'm hoping I won't have to replace these units for at least 5 years, but preferrably longer.

Apologies for the late reply.

waratah wrote:

Also how quite/noisy is the DS213+. I am upgrading from a 7 year old 4 bay Infrant readynas partly because it is so noisy.

I have two of them and both are nice an quiet, like 12 DBs. The DS213+ has a pair of large fans in the rear that are really effective at displacing the heat without high RPMs. It's an impresively simple design.

One of my NAS, however, has developed a humming/buzzing noise that seems to be related to the housing, not the fans. It started about a month after I purchased it, and was probably 30 DBs loud, but it's much less now (4 months later). I thought it mght be coming from the power supply, but when I pressed the sides of the housing, the noise would stop.

Consider the temperature of the environment for your NAS, that will definitely affect temp, and thus, fan speed. My space is an average 70-80 F and it's not a problem for the DS213+.

I have found the DS213+ very quiet. However, I had it close only during the intial setup. One of the nice things about NAS is that it doesn't have to be located in the same area.

I actually keep mine in the basement, it's connected with Gigabit Enet, it's cooler, and if something happens in my "office" my backups are safely away.

I also got some 4TB external Segate Backup Plus drives (Costco). I partitioned them and make bootable backups of each machine. It's locked in a safety deposit box at the bank and get's rotated on a regular basis.

Dear Waratah,

While I have struggled a bit with the install, I have gotten it mostly to work.

Specifically, on item 1 (Time Machine backup privacy issue for different users) I found a great writeup on the older link:
http://macsynology.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/setting-up-hard-drives-and-booting-y our-nas/#comment-1137

the key was to setup permissions for each user, and that was found a drop-down called "actions" for the specific folder. It works!

On item 2, the Photo Stn now seems to work fine. Don't know what I did, or if it just took time for the Synology folks to register my, but all seems OK now. Two new questions here are

• I am having trouble getting 'port 80' to work, so can't access from outside my house. I am in discussions with the Synology support on how to fix this on my router, but if anyone has any insights, would be welcome.
• How do I load a massive amount of photos into both my NAS and the Photo Station? I have nearly a terabyte stored on various external hard drives now, all Firewire. Would love to just connect those drives to the NAS directly and have it dump all the photos into the right folders, but I dont know how to do that. NAS does not have a FIREWIRE port, and dont know how to direct to the right folder. Any insights from anyone?

On item 3, just kept all off the admin except me. Do have a general security question though;

How secure does this group feel having ports 80, or 5000 and so on OPEN to the Internet? You read about all the malicious attacks, so am starting to feel insecure about having any ports OPEN.

On item 4, have not solved this one. Dont know how big a deal this is, as I seem to be able to get in even if the certificate is deemed untrustworthy every time to enter. Any advise?

Finally, on how noisy the DS213+ is, I find it very quiet. However, it is in my home office which is away from the rest of the house. I will say my son has one desk that is directly below the cabinet that has the NAS, and he says he does notice it sometimes. He said to him it sounds like our automatic coffee maker (a Keurig cartridge type), but not a big deal for him either.

Good luck to all with their NAS. My next task will be to setup the security camera on it. I'm sure I will have a few questions on that :-)

Mike

A side note to all following this thread - the best server NAS is the one that can run Plex Server and PlexConnect so you can have your non iTunes media run on Apple TV 3. I absolutely love it!

As far as NAS in general, I think it's a myth. The ultimate NAS is simply a small computer box with a ton of storage running on whatever OS fits your environment. Mac Mini, HTPC or some Linux box.

michaelpuyot wrote:

..Finally, on how noisy the DS213+ is, I find it very quiet. However, it is in my home office which is away from the rest of the house.

Great Thanks. I picked up a DS214+ today and am currently setting it up. It is sitting 6 inches away from me on my desk and all I can hear is my old Infrant ReadyNAS hammering away 10 feet way across the room. NICE! The DS214+ is currently verifying the two HDDs.

I did notice a DSM popup saying I should install the latest java version for my OS (Win8.1) &/or browser (Chrome). As DSM appears to be working how come I need Java?

Based on what I see on this thread, it seems that the Synology DS214 or DS414 is the way to go. I have a mid-2010 Macbook Pro running Mavericks. My goals include the following:

• Get iTunes and iPhoto off my laptop HD, and allow for sharing iPhoto photos with Facebook.
• Stream MP4 and MKV movie files directly to my Blu-Ray player, which supports media servers. Right now, I do so with an external USB 2.0 HD.
• Use the NAS server as a personal cloud from which I can access files remotely (mainly office-type documents)
• Use a RAID approach to protecting data.

I'd appreciate any thoughts on whether anybody believes the DS214 or DS414 can accomplish this, which it sounds like it can.

Thanks,

Josh