Networked Attached Storage
May 25th, 2009, 12:27am by Jake
Ever since I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5, I’ve been using TimeMachine to back up the ‘ole PowerMac G5. Little problem– I had a 250GB external drive and a 1TB internal drive. A couple weeks ago, the drive finally filled up and I need to upgrade. While I could get a basic 1TB external for $90 or less, I think this is a good opportunity to get a better storage solution. While I’ve considered getting a Drobo, those things are expensive and require another $200 to get their NAS bridge. My Flickr friends suggested a NASready RAID system, the Netgear ReadyNAS, which promises excellent Mac support. But it’s still more than I need.
So now I’ve got my eye on the Synology DS109j, which is only about $160 at Amazon. The big priority for a NAS solution is iTunes & TimeMachine support, so I can stream music & photos and backup the computers. could use the PowerMac as the server, but it’s a real energy hog. It looks like both are doable with the Synology, but I’ll have to read a little more in this thread and the parent forum to figure it out.
Anyways, what is everyone else doing for back-up & network storage?
May 25th, 2009 at 10:56 am
I looked into this a while back, too, and came to the same conclusion about the Drobo — too expensive, and it sounds like their NAS-related server programs (e.g., iTunes sharing) are a little kludgy. Nice hardware, and the hot swapping thing is nice (I have a bunch of old HDs lying around that I could use).
The one thing you didn’t mention is accessing the drive from outside your home network. Don’t know if you’d want to do that or not, but many of these guys have built-in FTP servers with a web interface. Looks like the one you’re thinking about has that covered.
As you can probably guess, I use my old Powerbook (also the pyslent server) as our home NAS. I figure that machine is on all the time anyway, and hanging a big external HD off of it gives me a full-featured NAS, with no worries about difficulties with iTunes, for example. Since that machine is running 10.4, I don’t do Time Machine over it, but my machines are backed up pretty regularly anyway (knock on wood). I back up using SuperDuper once a week, and my work machine gets a Time Machine backup every hour at work — all that by drives attached by FW/USB. I figure I want backups to be offline as much as possible.
It seems like you could use your MacBook (or is it an iBook) for a server if you wanted to, but if it’s older, you may have the same issue with Time Machine.
May 25th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
The iBook is long gone. FTP is something that could be useful and if I get the 1.5 TB drive, that should leave me plenty of room for non back-up services.
May 25th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
I have two BuffaloTech NASs and they work like a charm. One is a older 250GB LinkStation with an external 300GB drive added on and the other is a newer 2TB LinkStation Pro Duo running RAID 1 (so it’s 1TB effectively). I use the smaller one for things like ISOs for software, videos for streaming to the TiVo via pyTivo, and other miscellaneous data. I use the RAIDed one for storing my photos and home video. Picked both of these up at Frys for pretty decent prices. Highly recommended.