NAS Question/Advice

[Forestdeath]

Hi Guys,

Got a question for you, I've gotten on this whole digital media wagon and have converted all of my DVD's to m4v format, My hard dive space is running out and for me the best solution is to go for a NAS in a RAID1 config, I will mainly use the NAS for streaming video files, The majority is iTunes HD/SD TV Shows.

As iTunes video files are DRM'd I'm going to play the iTunes video from the NAS on my PC and then connect the aptop to my TV via HDMI.

My question is, Does anyone know if or what the quality of video is going to be like in this scenario?

 

[keeper]

Don't think you will have any problems providing you get a fast NAS.
I went for a QNAP 219P and i'm very pleased with it.
It holds all my media and serves as my time machine hard drive.
I back it up using a icy dock enclosure connected via esata.

Cheers Phil

 

[Forestdeath]

Don't think you will have any problems providing you get a fast NAS.
I went for a QNAP 219P and i'm very pleased with it.
It holds all my media and serves as my time machine hard drive.
I back it up using a icy dock enclosure connected via esata.

Cheers Phil

Hi Phil, thanks for your reply, I'm thinking of going for the Western Digital Mybook World Edition II and storing all of my data on it.

 

[roidy]

I've got a LG N2B1DD2 2 bay NAS with built-in Blu-Ray burner. It's a great NAS with the added bonus of a Blu-Ray burner which gives you extra options for backing up your data. What ever you do don't rely on Raid-1 as your only back-up solution.

 

[paduck]

I've got a LG N2B1DD2 2 bay NAS with built-in Blu-Ray burner. It's a great NAS with the added bonus of a Blu-Ray burner which gives you extra options for backing up your data. What ever you do don't rely on Raid-1 as your only back-up solution.

As gets pointed out each time this issue arises, RAID1 is not backup. It is about availability. You probably have limited, if any, need for RAID1. Plus, pulling out that second HD as a "backup" to store somewhere else will actually put the data at risk of corruption. You're better off without the RAID and simply having a USB hard drive that you mirror to periodically.

 

[roidy]

I've got a LG N2B1DD2 2 bay NAS with built-in Blu-Ray burner. It's a great NAS with the added bonus of a Blu-Ray burner which gives you extra options for backing up your data. What ever you do don't rely on Raid-1 as your only back-up solution.

As gets pointed out each time this issue arises, RAID1 is not backup. It is about availability. You probably have limited, if any, need for RAID1. Plus, pulling out that second HD as a "backup" to store somewhere else will actually put the data at risk of corruption. You're better off without the RAID and simply having a USB hard drive that you mirror to periodically.

Why are you quoting me? If you read my post you'll see I clearly told the OP not to rely on Raid-1 as his backup solution. I have never and would never use Raid-1 as a backup method.

I even posted in this thread listing the reasons why Raid-1 isn't reliable as a backup:-

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/907663/

My media is all stored on my LG NAS which I then backup to seperate external HD's. Then everytime I add another 25gb or 50gb of content to the NAS I burn off the new files to a blank Blu-Ray disk depending on weather I have 25gb or 50gb disks to hand, these disks are then kept in a floor safe in my garage just incase the unthinkable happens.

 

[paduck]

Why are you quoting me? If you read my post you'll see I clearly told the OP not to rely on Raid-1 as his backup solution. I have never and would never use Raid-1 as a backup method.

I even posted in this thread listing the reasons why Raid-1 isn't reliable as a backup:-

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/907663/

My media is all stored on my LG NAS which I then backup to seperate external HD's. Then everytime I add another 25gb or 50gb of content to the NAS I burn off the new files to a blank Blu-Ray disk depending on weather I have 25gb or 50gb disks to hand, these disks are then kept in a floor safe in my garage just incase the unthinkable happens.

Roidy - my bad, I meant to be replying to the OP. I agree with you 100%. Sorry for the implication.

 

[roidy]

No problem But it is worrying how many people think Raid-1 is the answer to all there backup needs.

 

[Wavell]

To put the speed into perspective.. I stream my movies in HD from a timecapsule (which isn't exactly known for fast transfer speeds) to a Mac Mini under the TV and it's works just fine. Thinking of moving to a DROBO at some point though, just for the drive redundancy

 

[psburley]

Guys what about cloud backup. I am testing carbonite. To be honest I was about to buy a NAS for streaming to appletv (just want to make sure it works well over wireless and what type) and I was going to use raid...you guys have put doubt in my mind. But wnat about an off line backup like carbonite?? (interested in your NAS set up as well for wirless stream of my VOB video files.

 

[roidy]

Cloud backup is nice but when your talking of terabyte size video librarys then you better have one seriously fast internet connection Most internet connections have extremely fast download speeds but very slow upload speeds, my connection is 12Meg downstream but only 1Meg upstream so if I wanted to upload my entire library it would take about 6 months

 

[keeper]

Cloud backup is nice but when your talking of terabyte size video librarys then you better have one seriously fast internet connection Most internet connections have extremely fast download speeds but very slow upload speeds, my connection is 12Meg downstream but only 1Meg upstream so if I wanted to upload my entire library it would take about 6 months

Agreed, I looked at Crashplan and even with my small library it was going to take 56 days.

I went for QNAP 219P with 2 1.5tb drives in raid one. 500gb is split and used as my time machine drive.

I also back up to an external drive that i can offsite.

 

[prostuff1]

Agreed, I looked at Crashplan and even with my small library it was going to take 56 days.

I also back up to an external drive that i can offsite.

Ha, you think 56 days is a long time. I have CrashPlan set up on my unRAID server and it is supposed to take almost a year to finish. Granted that is with me heavily using my network traffic at the same time. If i turned everything else off and let CrashPlan have full throughput i could probably get stuff finished in 1/3 the time.

 

[rayward]

Hi Phil, thanks for your reply, I'm thinking of going for the Western Digital Mybook World Edition II and storing all of my data on it.

I have one of these. It's fast enough to stream HD video content to my Apple TVs, but it does seem a little slow at times (maybe because I'm pushing 4GB files around my network, but still...).

The only issue I have to deal with is that it takes a while to show up on my iMac when I've had to reboot. I have to make sure that the NAS has mounted before I open iTunes, or iTunes will default back to the local (empty) library.

 

[Tup]

The only issue I have to deal with is that it takes a while to show up on my iMac when I've had to reboot. I have to make sure that the NAS has mounted before I open iTunes, or iTunes will default back to the local (empty) library.

So far the only thing I've managed to put automator to use is for exactly this, mounts my timecapsule drive automagically on reboot/startups..

Still personally confused as what is the best way to keep backed up and serve media round the house, toiling in the HP Smart Media Serve using iTunes or maybe a mac mini with a couple of drives attached... For the moment, a 2TB timecapsule and an external harddrive to make a back up of that will do the trick.

What I'm looking for ideally is to have something tucked away, doesn't need babysitting and does the job of serving the media to the apple tv/iphone/macbook other laptops and any other devices that come into the frame in the future and manage the backup process.

 

[Vol7ron]

I was running into a problem with space as well and for my intermediate solution, i pulled one of my old Athlon X2 boxes out of storage and threw in 4 1TB drives and installed windows server 2003 R2 on it. So all my m4v and m4a files (as well as pictures) site on the device. I also have Itunes installed on the server and have my hard drives mapped to the itunes media directory. The 2 Apple TV's i own are connected directly to the server and stream all content to the units. The nice thing is that with home sharing, all content i purchase on my iMac or Macbook Pro get copied directly into the directories on the server when itunes connect to the server. The only issue i have run into i think that the issue is related to the Sata controller is that occasionally the transfer rates drop on the server from an average of 40~50MB/s to 2MB/s. Eventually i plan to overhaul the whole system and put a hardware RAID controller in and beef it up to 8 TB's of space with a couple of hot spares. But the system works wonderfully aside from that. Have well over 150 movies and 6 TV Series. I love my apple TV's

 

[Forestdeath]

After looking into this further, I've decided that I am going to upgrade buy internal HDD and then buy a external one for backups, I'm not sure why I thought Raid1 was a good idea lol.

Anyway thanks for you replies.