Ya... So hard drives just went up in price. So you might not want to buy hard drives for awhile unless you go to Best Buy. They seriously have the best deal right now for the most storage. They have 3TB external drives (MyBook Essential USB 3.0) for $129.99. Every where else I'm having trouble to find cheaper with my roommate so we bought 10 of them for our NAS we are building as prices increasingly get worse. We are taking them out so we can place it into our NAS.
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NAS for iTunes storage
- Thread starter weenie
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I only say that in that I considered it, and decided on an external system directly attached to my Mac. Why?
1. You need iTunes running on a machine, and the machine running.
2. Data transfer over a network, (and mine is all hard wired CAT5) is slow!
(synced an ATV1 a couple of times...bloody painful)
3. Following from point 2, I have a 4Tb plus library for access by 5 ATVs. Backing that up over a network? Kill me now!
4. Generally ripping and such and then waiting for every movie to copy over?? Again, take a spoon and dig out my heart....it'll be less painful!
Currently with a Drobo attached via FW800. Its now to slow for my liking, especially since thunderbolt is here and available. Will soon upgrade it to a thunderbolt solution.
One point i must make...I dont jailbreak. Apple TV, iPhone, whatever. Tried it a couple of times, hated the fact every time a software update happened, the JB was broken. But a direct attached storage to an ATV (as long as its only one) would probably be a very tempting option to me.
Nope. It's on Mac or Windows. Best advice is just to map a drive. Windows really doesn't pay attention to the difference. ISCI is nice but unnecessary just for iTunes. It'll run fine. (or, at least, it does for me!).
Thanks. That's what I did. Now the painful exercise of moving the itunes library.
I purchased a DS1511+ a few months back for this very purpose. It's connected (via the network obviously) to my Mac Mini and has so far performed flawlessly. Very minor delay after watching one show to then access the menu again (as the hard drives go to sleep after 20 mins), but way better than when I was using external drives connected via USB to the mini.
Highly recommended. I've now got 13Tb of space
I just got the ds1511+ as well. Setup over my network was a pain, and I still can't use the Synology assistant software on a Mac (have to use a pc), but have no problem seeing it on the network and using time machine.
As for speed, I set up the link aggregation, and speed is super fast.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but if you have everything hardwired, wouldn't a NAS on a Gb network be faster than external FW800-drives? Or at least have very similar speed?
Happy
I'm really happy now that we have everything done. My roommate and I that is. We are waiting on the parts to come in as we have finally ordered everything. So our build:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220466
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128512
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129074
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116394
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817341016
Then we have 18TB we are going to put into our storage solution. The other 12TB not sure what we are gonna do with yet. We also went with the CPU because of the 35W and hopefully we can save more power this way.
Once everything is in and it's built, I'll be placing up photos and some benchmarking of it. Meaning read and write speeds + power consumption.
Total Cost: ~$1200 (mainly cause of the hard drives)
Edit: Forgot PSU. Haha.
I'm really happy now that we have everything done. My roommate and I that is. We are waiting on the parts to come in as we have finally ordered everything. So our build:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220466
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128512
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129074
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116394
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817341016
Then we have 18TB we are going to put into our storage solution. The other 12TB not sure what we are gonna do with yet. We also went with the CPU because of the 35W and hopefully we can save more power this way.
Once everything is in and it's built, I'll be placing up photos and some benchmarking of it. Meaning read and write speeds + power consumption.
Total Cost: ~$1200 (mainly cause of the hard drives)
Edit: Forgot PSU. Haha.
Theroretically? No.
Compare the speeds. Then consider that having the NAS feeding to the iTunes server (my iMac) via ethernet, then feeding from there to the ATVs.
If I could, I'd have the 7-8Tb inside the mac. That'd be my preferred solution.
Attachments
If I understand you correctly, you mean that if you're streaming media then the Gb network will only reach a theoretical max of 500 Mb/s since it needs to both send and receive at the same time, whilst the FW800 only need to send which it can do at 800 Mb/s? To max out at 500 Mb/s, the movies would have to be over 80 GB each if you're streaming to all five ATVs at once...
I'm sorry if it comes out like I'm contradicting you, that's not my intention. I'm just not getting it
I'm sorry if it comes out like I'm contradicting you, that's not my intention. I'm just not getting it
No problem in talking about it. Im not here selling it, just saying how I see it.
Remember these are also 'theoretical' maximums. I've never encountered a device that hits its maximum other then in some burst modes. Ethernet or Firewire alike. And the drobo definitely doesn't use the firewire well at all. Hence my desire to move to thunderbolt.
My understanding is networking will also slow down to the maximum speed of its slowest component. The Apple TVs are only 100Base, not gigabit. More then enough to pull a movie through granted, but still a big drop in the speeds we're talking about.
And secretly, whilst I consider myself fairly advanced in knowledge on PCs and Macs, I must admit I hate networking. For me its a necessary evil.
Perhaps Im just more inclined toward a more central control point also. Im always happy to learn otherwise. (As long as I dont have to 'mix' environments ie: Windows/Mac/Unix) Been there many years ago and hate it.
Question, are you really having really bad speeds in terms of your wired connection across your house? Right now I'm downloading on my MacBook as my Hackintosh is currently down cause of damn network drivers. Anyways, I write to a TimeCapsule pretty fast, like moving 20GBs in under a hour or so. Also working from my Mac Mini Server is fast too, I transfer data from there all the time as well and while I stream Plex.
The main issue I encountered was to sync my iThings: for that, iTunes needs its library+mp3's combo, not a DLNA/media server.
For performance reasons, I left my library file on my Mac while putting the mp3 in a dedicated root folder on the NAS, mounted at startup. The first play is always slow, as the NAS drives have to get out of their energy saving mode. I couldn't centralise the library file, as iTunes was REALLY slow when searching for a file.
So the advantage is that MP3s are available to everybody, shared in DLNA towards the TVs, new purchases are written thru the network on the NAS, but librairies files are not synced from one machine to another. I guess some script should do the trick, but I'm not as Geek as I used to be.
For performance reasons, I left my library file on my Mac while putting the mp3 in a dedicated root folder on the NAS, mounted at startup. The first play is always slow, as the NAS drives have to get out of their energy saving mode. I couldn't centralise the library file, as iTunes was REALLY slow when searching for a file.
So the advantage is that MP3s are available to everybody, shared in DLNA towards the TVs, new purchases are written thru the network on the NAS, but librairies files are not synced from one machine to another. I guess some script should do the trick, but I'm not as Geek as I used to be.
So...to fill up an ATV1 across the network (100Base) were talking 5-6 hrs? For me, I consider that very slow. Gigabit networking would naturally be faster, except for the fact the ATV is only 100Base.
I also have a time machine, and after the first backup of my core data, its fine. But considering my library is approx 4Tb, resyncing my ATVs even once a week would be unacceptable to me. So for me, the ATV2, hard drive less, is a non issue.
I would go with the Synology disk station DS211J. It just needs a couple of drives added. Has lots of features including an iTunes server and BitTorrent.
Agreed. Back when I did sync information to my AppleTV as it was the only way to play movies in my dorm back in the day I would just connect each other directly via ethernet. I got 4 movies moved over in about 10minutes or so. That was acceptable to me.
Though I don't sync much these days. Just stream it using Plex from TimeCapsule.
I like the idea of the built in iTunes server on a NAS, except for when Apple updates iTunes and breaks the model of how the other devices communicate, making the NAS iTunes server ineffective.
I may not be "up" on the latest and greatest concerning third-party NAS units but I think that third-parties can't really make a full-fledged iTunes server. The problem is the Fairplay copy protection/encryption and the intricacies of the iTunes database and metadata which can only be handled by Apple products/software (at least from a legal/practical aspect, and without hacking).
A quick check on the Synology website seems to suggest that you still need an iTunes client running on a Mac/PC in order to access the iTunes content stored on the NAS, so I wouldn't call that a full-function iTunes server (more like a simple iTunes-compatible shared disk which is practically the very definition of a NAS). The only extra bit they seem to offer is support for playlists but you still need a copy of iTunes running somewhere to access the content.
What everyone seems to want (it seems) is a true, stand-alone iTunes server that can operate without iTunes running on a Mac/PC. In any case, that's still my hope, that Apple eventually puts iTunes in an enhanced version of the Airport Extreme or Time Capsule. Given that, all of your iOS devices (including the Apple TV) could access your iTunes content without the need for a full-blown Mac/PC host. There was a rumor a few months ago about a new Apple device something like this with additional features for Apple's iCloud. Maybe that will eventually happen but for now the only thing I'd call a "true" iTunes server is a Mac or PC that is also running the iTunes application itself.
I am looking at Amahi. I have an older HP MediaSmart Server running WHS with Drive Extender. DE was killed off in the new version of WHS, but Amahi has an open source equivalent, Greyhole.
The beauty of DE and grehole (unlike RAID) is that you can mix and match drives and add them to the pool. All those HDDs you have lying around? Use them. No need to buy expensive new ones until you need to expand.
The beauty of DE and grehole (unlike RAID) is that you can mix and match drives and add them to the pool. All those HDDs you have lying around? Use them. No need to buy expensive new ones until you need to expand.
Thanks for the tip, I will look into Greyhole as well since I have quite a few HDD that are gathering dust. And if I could use them as large secondary back-up drive, it would be great.