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Storage Solutions for our OUT-OF-CONTROL iTunes Libraries

What hard drive configuration in a Mac Pro (4 bay) would you all suggest for both storing and backing up a large itunes library? I'd like something to tide me over while I save up for a Drobo or DroboPro.

Here's what I was thinking, but I'm open to any suggestions.

Bay 1: WD Velociraptor 300GB (OS + Apps)
Bay 2: WD Black 1TB (Raid 0 w/ Bay 3)
Bay 3: WD Black 1TB (Raid 0 w/ Bay 2)
Bay 4: WD Green 2TB (Time Machine Backup of Bays 2 + 3)

Basically I'd store all of my data including iTunes, photos, etc. on bays 2 and 3 in Raid 0 and keep a backup in Bay 4 with Time Machine. How does this look? What would you do different? Thanks for the help!
 
BG-Mac said:
What hard drive configuration in a Mac Pro (4 bay) would you all suggest for both storing and backing up a large itunes library? I'd like something to tide me over while I save up for a Drobo or DroboPro.

Here's what I was thinking, but I'm open to any suggestions.

Bay 1: WD Velociraptor 300GB (OS + Apps)
Bay 2: WD Black 1TB (Raid 0 w/ Bay 3)
Bay 3: WD Black 1TB (Raid 0 w/ Bay 2)
Bay 4: WD Green 2TB (Time Machine Backup of Bays 2 + 3)

Basically I'd store all of my data including iTunes, photos, etc. on bays 2 and 3 in Raid 0 and keep a backup in Bay 4 with Time Machine. How does this look? What would you do different? Thanks for the help!
Click to expand...

I have something similar

In my Mac Pro I have the following:

Bay 1: WD Black 640 GB (OS + Apps)
Bay 2: WD Black 1 TB (Current Photo Work)
Bay 3: WD Green 2 TB (Media Backup)
Bay 4: WD Green 1 TB (Time Machine set up to monitor only Bay 1)

I have a couple of external drives that do the following:

Rosewill 2 Drive Enclosure w/2 WD Green 1 TB drives that I have all my media on for my already ordered, soon to be arriving Mini. I rip my dvds and cds on my Mac Pro and then copy them to the Mac Pro's Bay 3 and the Rosewill enclosure, so Time Machine is unnecessary.

A couple of Metal Gear enclosures that I fill with various 1 TB drives to back up the photo work as it goes. I backup to both and then pull them together when full to put into offsite archival.

Similar to what you're doing but with a little bit of deviation :)
 
Donar said:
I just got a drobo (4 bay) for doing backups of my 2TB WesternDigital MyBook (connected to my NAS), iPhoto Library and iTunes Library. Does anybody know a good GUI to use & automate rsync on OSX?
Click to expand...

I use Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a GUI for Rsync.
 
I tried CCC but it does not recognise the NetworkShares provided by my SynologyNAS (the 2 TB WD Disk). If i try to use "Other location" CCC creates a install package that has to be run on the other "computer", and this can not be run because it's a NAS.

I had success using "arrsync" but there is no option for scheduling...
 
I have my ATV synched to my MacBook with some movies being stored on a portable USB drive. When the USB drive is detached I lose the cover art in iTunes for the movies stored there.

Is there any way around this?
 
BOTLY said:
I have my ATV synched to my MacBook with some movies being stored on a portable USB drive. When the USB drive is detached I lose the cover art in iTunes for the movies stored there.

Is there any way around this?
Click to expand...

Maybe try using aliases for those files?
 
The new Drobo with FW800 as I have looked at TigerDirect.com and NewEgg.com they are both the same price $449.00

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4032471&sku=D162-1010


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822240010


I just purchased 2 of these from Tigerdirect although I had 6 Seagate 1TB HD so I can put three in each, one to write everything to, and the other to mirror to, this Forum helped me make my decision, so for just under $1,200.00 I have the storage solution to grow with, right now I am at 1 TB total storage used between Music, Movies, and TV Shows and misc videos.

Now I need one just for the XXX Rated media :D

Just Kidding

Thanks to everyone on this site, the info here is great and it comes from ppl who are actually using these products instead of sitting at a desk and writing a review on something they used for a 20 minute show, like CNET but I think the ppl who review this stuff should at least own it and use it on a daily basis, those are the reviews that count.
 
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Wicked1 said:
Yep that is the new one however when I goto their site it says $499.00 with a $40 rebate :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

When you add it to your cart its. $449.99 then you get the $40 rebate so its $409.99 or something.

If you looked on Amazon 2 months ago it was going for like $360.00 or something like that :rolleyes:. This is the FW version.
 
HP EX485 MediaSmart Home Server

Costco has the HP EX485 MediaSmart Home Server on sale as of today for $548 (includes S&H). It comes with a 750GB hard drive, plus another free 500GB. Just passing along a good deal.
 
Hi all. Just re-visiting this thread because I'm soon to be the proud owner of a Mac Mini and am going to retire my ecotragic XP media server greybox very soon!

Unfortunately my budget does not currently extend to a Drobo or HP Media Server style solution for storage (especially in view of my Mini expenditure!)

A quick question for you all - I've already bought the 4gb ram and 500gb drive to upgrade my Mini. I'm planning on using the Mini's drive for my media storage needs which should be sufficient for the foreseeable future and although I'm not 100% sure - a 1.5tb NewerTech stackable drive for time machine backups of the whole network (1 MBP, 1 iMac and the Mini itself).

My question is - when my media collection outgrows my 500gb drive could I add and then daisy chain several NewerTech drives together for additional storage and could I then back up the storage drive using time machine?

Comments/suggestions greatly appreciated!
 
srexy said:
My question is - when my media collection outgrows my 500gb drive could I add and then daisy chain several NewerTech drives together for additional storage and could I then back up the storage drive using time machine?

Comments/suggestions greatly appreciated!
Click to expand...

i would avoid the NewerTech stackers, I've heard lots of reports of overheating and other problems with them.

I use a 2 drive rosewill usb enclosure ($50 from Newegg) and then filled it with 2 1 TB WD Green drives which work perfectly for media streaming,

just a thought
 
robotartfashion said:
i would avoid the NewerTech stackers, I've heard lots of reports of overheating and other problems with them.

I use a 2 drive rosewill usb enclosure ($50 from Newegg) and then filled it with 2 1 TB WD Green drives which work perfectly for media streaming,

just a thought
Click to expand...

Thanks for that. I've been doing some research and the prognosis for the ministackers isn't good.

I'm thinking I'll go for the one you've mentioned or a fanless enclosure like this one http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEFW924AL1K/ rather than roll the dice and hope my ministacker goes against the trend.
 
jakerules133 said:
I just saw these yesterday and holy ****.


http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11263
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11261
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11118


My only question is :

If you get the 4x8tb quadra package, would it show up as 1 hard drive or 4 on your desktop. That would be pretty sweet, a 32 tb external hard drive.
Click to expand...

That would be a question for Lacie.

Unless you really want to pay a premium for the 32TB worth of space I would look for something different. I did a quick calculation and 32TB is 16x2TB drives and the value for that right now is about $3,700. You are essentially paying Lacie $4,000 for there hardware. I'm not sure about you, but I could do a lot with that 4 grand other then just spend it on hardware. Hell you could build the server and a HTPC and probably still have change left over.
 
Due to the disappointing speed (gotten 36 MB/s write) I'm considering utilizing ZFS to house the data, probably in FreeBSD (maybe FreeNAS). I've read great things about it. Not as stupid-simple as the Drobo but at least I wouldn't be tied to a proprietary system.
 
mmccaskill said:
Due to the disappointing speed (gotten 36 MB/s write) I'm considering utilizing ZFS to house the data, probably in FreeBSD (maybe FreeNAS). I've read great things about it. Not as stupid-simple as the Drobo but at least I wouldn't be tied to a proprietary system.
Click to expand...

If that is over the LAN then that is not too awful bad. If it is a Gigabit LAN then it may be a little slow but you will more then likely cap out the network speed before you hit other caps.

Take a look at unRAID and see if it might work for your needs.
 
prostuff1 said:
That would be a question for Lacie.

Unless you really want to pay a premium for the 32TB worth of space I would look for something different. I did a quick calculation and 32TB is 16x2TB drives and the value for that right now is about $3,700. You are essentially paying Lacie $4,000 for there hardware. I'm not sure about you, but I could do a lot with that 4 grand other then just spend it on hardware. Hell you could build the server and a HTPC and probably still have change left over.
Click to expand...

I was thinking that you could just buy 4 of the 2tb versions then upgrade them yourself. The pci card and other stuff that comes with the big package can be bought separately. So if you bought 4 of the 2tb versions for 700 bucks each thats 2800 + 12 more drives at 250 bucks per. That comes to 3000 which is 5800. Add in 300 for the pci card and thats 6100.

I just thought that was a good deal, but I don't know too much about other prodcuts. What other products did you have in mind?
 
jakerules133 said:
I just saw these yesterday and holy ****.


http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11263
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11261
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11118


My only question is :

If you get the 4x8tb quadra package, would it show up as 1 hard drive or 4 on your desktop. That would be pretty sweet, a 32 tb external hard drive.
Click to expand...
yes, they can be combined as a single drive with different RAID-levels below, something like RAID5 for each 4-drive-Qube and then RAID0 over all 4 Qubes, making a RAID50 single drive within the OS.
 
mmccaskill said:
Due to the disappointing speed (gotten 36 MB/s write) I'm considering utilizing ZFS to house the data, probably in FreeBSD (maybe FreeNAS). I've read great things about it. Not as stupid-simple as the Drobo but at least I wouldn't be tied to a proprietary system.
Click to expand...
You can get more than 75MB/s over a GigE port with a TS-509 Pro (and it got two ports) with 5 drives and RAID5. This will be an open system as it uses Linux software RAID down below, so that you can even take out the drives and put them into a general purpose Linux system.
 
jakerules133 said:
I was thinking that you could just buy 4 of the 2tb versions then upgrade them yourself. The pci card and other stuff that comes with the big package can be bought separately. So if you bought 4 of the 2tb versions for 700 bucks each thats 2800 + 12 more drives at 250 bucks per. That comes to 3000 which is 5800. Add in 300 for the pci card and thats 6100.

I just thought that was a good deal, but I don't know too much about other prodcuts. What other products did you have in mind?
Click to expand...

Still, 2800 for hardware is expensive. I guess it depends on how you plan on using it. I built my own NAS for about 500 (would be more with some extra hardware I do not currently have) but if i were to max it out and use 2TB drives in it I could get it up to about 40TB worth of storage.
 
prostuff1 said:
If that is over the LAN then that is not too awful bad. If it is a Gigabit LAN then it may be a little slow but you will more then likely cap out the network speed before you hit other caps.

Take a look at unRAID and see if it might work for your needs.
Click to expand...

unRAID concerns me because of the dedicated parity drive. What if that drive fails? Don't I lose everything? I'm also confused about the ability to dynamically add capacity. Is it like Drobo where the volume size is fixed at startup?
 
starcat said:
You can get more than 75MB/s over a GigE port with a TS-509 Pro (and it got two ports) with 5 drives and RAID5. This will be an open system as it uses Linux software RAID down below, so that you can even take out the drives and put them into a general purpose Linux system.
Click to expand...

Pretty pricey compared to a Drobo.
 
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