Storing music + media on Airport Extreme connected hard drive

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Level 1

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Storing music + media on Airport Extreme connected hard drive

I'm considering consolidating several external hard drives full of music and storing all iTunes media on a single Airport Extreme connected hard drive (2 or 3 TB). Hoping this will help by storing all music in one convenient place. This will NOT be the back-up source, this will be where all iTunes files are stored.

I'm a type-A music guy, so if there's a big lag calling up music, it's not likely going to be worth the sacrifice.

Does anyone have experience with such a migration?

What sort of hard drive should I look for: USB powered hard drive or AC powered?

Any other tips I should be aware of?

FWIW I'm on a fairly reliable Comcast connection with 12mps download speed (or at least that's what I'm paying for).

Thanks in advance.

Posted on Sep 13, 2011 9:02 AM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

148,447 points

Sep 13, 2011 12:56 PM in response to eriksiebert

Depending on the network media between the iTunes host and the iTunes Media folder on the AirPort Disk (USB HDD attached to an AirPort Extreme Base Station), you can expect to get a sustained data transfer rate of roughly 6.5 to 8.5 MBps (52 Mbps to 60 Mbps). More than enough for audio streaming and even up to Blu-ray streaming (40 Mbps). Note: These values do not include over the Internet streaming.

The key performance criteria for NAS devices (in this case the AirPort Disk) are read and write throughput or data transfer rate. In turn, throughput is affected by three things:

NAS Performance: NAS processor, OS, and file system used. For the AirPort Disk, you will want to partition the drive for Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for best performance.
Client Performance: Basically the same criteria as for NAS ... but applied to the network client accessing the streams.
Network Performance: Total available bandwidth and the effects of Wi-Fi interferance for wireless connections.

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Answer 2

Sep 13, 2011 1:04 PM in response to eriksiebert

You may also want to factor in the External HDD powering up as Airport Extreme will put an external HDD to sleep after a few mins. Which will cause delay in your Mac locating/playing the first song, I have an external HDD connected to mine and have no problems with lag after the drive is out of sleep. So for a NAS in my opinion it works really well. (Also stream films from it)

*It should be a powered USB drive.

*I found connecting more than one drive, or partitioning the drive connected increases seek time on my extreme (A1143 AE)

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Answer 3

eriksiebert Author

Level 1

10 points

Sep 13, 2011 4:54 PM in response to Tesserax

Thanks for the info.

RE: NAS

Should I consider an Ethernet equipped NAS hard drive rather than USB?

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Answer 4

Tesserax

Level 10

148,447 points

Sep 13, 2011 9:18 PM in response to eriksiebert

Yes, but be sure that your network is fast enough not to be the bottleneck for the NAS. Most modern NAS devices work best with Gigabit Ethernet connections ... which the 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBSn) supports. Even the least costly single-drive NAS devices can exceed the 12.5 MBps bandwidth limit of 100 Mbps Ethernet, let alone 7.5 MBps of 802.11n.

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