Alternative storage options for 256 Gig MacBooks?

[SBlue1]

Hey there. What do you guys do to solve the problem of running out of storage on those pathetic 256 GB MacBooks? Is a WD My Book, WD My Cloud or the Seagate Personal Cloud useful? Or should I better get a Synolgy NAS?

My user case is that I have a 1 TB SSD at the moment in my MacBook Pro and already 250 GB of that is used by the system as I see in the system info, another 180 GB is a second user, another 50 GB are photos and videos, another 50 GB is apps and another 50 GB is iTunes. I have another spinning HDD attached to my AP Extreme for big and seldom used data and the backup.

If I would have just 256 or even 512 GB SSD, what do I do with the rest of my data? Can I outsource the photo library and iTunes library to the My Cloud or NAS? Would it make sense or would it slow down the system? Is there a lag or a startup delay?

I don't want to wait for iTunes or Photos for 10 seconds to connect to the server first. I want it instantly, something to expand the small internal storage since I can't swap the built in SSD.

The second user would have a Windows machine then so 180 GB less to worry about but it would be nice to access some of the stuff like the shared iTunes library from that computer as well.

What do you guys do and why? What is the benefit of a NAS compared to a My Cloud and Personal Cloud?

 

[SBlue1]

Is nobody using WD My Cloud or Seagarte Personal Cloud?

 

[hobowankenobi]

To be clear, My Cloud is a NAS. Any dedicated network storage counts as, well, Network Attached Storage.

Don't know about Seagate offerings recently, but my experience has been that all low cost NAS options, regardless of brand, were slow overall: mounting, file transfers, and managing. I gave up years ago with several different brand/models, including early LaCie, Seagate, and Drobo NAS offerings.

They may be much better now, but once I moved over to a not-the-bottom end Synology, performance was good. Perhaps even very good.

I still have an old and slow Synology at home that is adequate for normal use (subjective), but the last few I have installed in the last year or two that were middle-of-road products are noticeably faster and feature rich.

Until I see otherwise, I will be suspect of all low-end NAS products, especially those that are not committed to on-going support, improvement, and updates.

Having said all that, I doubt you will get instant, unless you are looking at higher end, pricey gear, and you have a robust network to match. Even that will likely cost you (at least) 1-2 seconds.

You can, for example have the NAS mount on log-in, assuming you ever log out or reboot. That mount time, is the longest single delay. Beyond that, it is all about the network throughput, and the NAS performance itself, including the NIC, the CPU, the storage array speed, etc.

Cheaper = slower...generally speaking. So I would caution not to expect that any low end NAS will be fast.

 

[SBlue1]

Thanks. So does it make sense to put the whole iTunes and Photos libraries on a NAS? Does anybody has any experience with that?

And can a second computer use that iTunes library as well? At the moment me and my wife share the same music library but what about her using her new windows machine?

 

[hobowankenobi]

Good question. I expect the answer is yes...but I am not running it via a NAS. i have a media PC (Win10) that is always on, and running iTunes, among other things. Share to all other devices, Mac and iOS. I see Synology supports it, but I have not used it (yet).

OTOH, I see folks saying this out dated, and there are other ways to go.

 

[Howard2k]

Thanks. So does it make sense to put the whole iTunes and Photos libraries on a NAS? Does anybody has any experience with that?

And can a second computer use that iTunes library as well? At the moment me and my wife share the same music library but what about her using her new windows machine?

I keep my iTunes on NAS, and I keep most of my Lightroom on NAS. It works fantastically. I'm running a ZyXEL NAS with mirrored 2TB drives in it, and 802.11ac with 1.3GHz wifi. (It doesn't maintain that PHY rate throughout my living area, but it's available if I'm close enough).

Photos and iPhoto - I could be wrong, but I thought that these were a bit quirky on a NAS. I was moving from an iMac with a local Aperture library and a local iPhoto library so I migrated both of these into Lightroom first, then moved my Lightroom library to my NAS as I migrated form the iMac to the MBPro.

So when I take photos I import them to local SSD based library first, do any edits etc., then I can migrate them off to the NAS to free up space.

Editing files on the NAS works well. The file has to load into memory first but once the file has loaded into memory the manipulation is not bottlenecked by network performance as it's a local operation.

It does take a few seconds after boot before I can access my iTunes library. And if I'm out an about then I don't have access to it unless I bring up a VPN tunnel. But when I'm out and about I'm typically not

I also use my NAS to do Time Machine backups. It functions as as torrent client etc.

 

[SBlue1]

So the NAS is on all the time? Is there a power sawing standby mode? And then it would take a few seconds for iTunes to load the library when you start up iTunes?

 

[Howard2k]

So the NAS is on all the time? Is there a power sawing standby mode? And then it would take a few seconds for iTunes to load the library when you start up iTunes?

Yep, I keep mine on all the time. Well, relatively. It's programmed to turn off during the night and turn on in the AM, and the HDDs go to sleep after a period of no usage. So it manages power consumption, I don't touch that day to day.

When I first power up the MBPro I usually wait 30 seconds to a minute to allow everything to connect. And on occasion I might have to open the shortcut to the network drive that I have on my desktop, but that's pretty rate. For the most part it works fantastically. I just need to be vigilant about hopping between networks. If I jump from one network to another I need to ensure I've closed my files etc. There are a few ways to use iTunes and a NAS. I just dumped the entire thing onto the NAS, including the libraries. But you could keep the media files on the NAS and the libraries locally, that would work too and might actually be slightly "cleaner".

I haven't tried having a second computer access the iTunes library from the NAS. I suspect it would work as long as I kept both computers operation the same version of iTunes and only one accessing at a time, but I'm not actually sure.

The most problematic thing that happens is when I have a really long track. If I have a 20 minute audio track and the HDDs go to sleep then there can be a pause while it then spins up the drives and transfers the next track. I think I then changed the HDD sleep interval from 15 minutes to 30 minutes to combat this.

I wouldn't say it's failsafe. I'd be prepared to mess around a little and try a few things and see what works. If you're ok with that then go nuts.

I also did try a couple of routers that had HDD interfaces. They were all crap. I also tried a few NAS boxes before finding one that worked well. I had a Buffalo NAS that was a disaster. And a DLink router that was equally poor when trying to plug in a HDD.

 

[hobowankenobi]

I would add:

Keep in mind that a smallish NAS consumes something like 10-20 watts. Like having a small florescent light on. This not like a dedicated PC with a 500-800 watt power supply.

Synology DS118 with a single drive: 9.4 W / 4.22 W Access / Hibernation power consumption

That's less than 10 Watts when running. Why not leave it on all the time?

In comparison, a cable box could use up to 45 Watts...in stand-by mode.

 

[satcomer]

So the NAS is on all the time? Is there a power sawing standby mode? And then it would take a few seconds for iTunes to load the library when you start up iTunes?

The hard drives might sleep but it’s up to you what services you want to run! Today’s smart NAS are fast becoming server replacements!

 

[SBlue1]

Sound not that bad. Now how do I move other things from the 256 gig MacBook to the NAS besides the iTunes library? I guess the photos library would be no problem but what about other things that fill up my drive like mail attachments or messages? How do I tell the system to store those things on the NAS?

 

[Howard2k]

Sound not that bad. Now how do I move other things from the 256 gig MacBook to the NAS besides the iTunes library? I guess the photos library would be no problem but what about other things that fill up my drive like mail attachments or messages? How do I tell the system to store those things on the NAS?

I use Lightroom.

Iphoto worked in NAS from what I recall. But I have a hunch that Photos does not. I can’t be sure though. IIRC I could not define the lirbary on the NAS, it would only look locally.

Foe email, I use web gmail. I don’t use the macos email software, sorry.

For iMovie I created a virtual drive image on the NAS but mounted that locally. That approach might even work for Photos too in hindsight.


I recommend buying from somewhere with a warranty. Then develop a good list of apps that you can quickly check. I am not batting 1,000, we obviously use different apps, but post them up and someone else will know I’m sure. There are quite a few of us that use NAS.