NAS for home media

[kaiowas]

Hello people

I recently moved home and had ethernet ports installed from the study to the lounge and bedroom area so i could attach my tv and wd media player to a NAS. I was going to buy a simple 2tb external nas from WD, but people advised me not to and instead to get a 2-bay NAS device that has RAID 1 etc. in case of failure. Having read your FAQ, I now understand that RAID 1 won't always save me, but it might be better than nothing.

Anyway to the point, I am currently using a macbook with OSX 10.5 and would like a NAS that can be read by my Samsung smart tv that is in the lounge room, it has ethernet and usb ports in it and can read usb drives hooked up to my dgnd3700. My WD live media player seems to read about everything and anything, so no worries there.

I have about 750gb of movies and television shows on my current 1tb WD external USB drive, mostly my own dvd collection, some of which still needs to be ripped. So I would mostly just be using the NAS to store and play media. If possible it would be good to be able to watch media on both devices at the same time, so watch a tv show from the NAS in the lounge while also watching a movie in the bedroom from the NAS Also if I could find a NAS device that supports torrents while the computer is asleep/off that might come in handy as well.

I have been advised to look at the Synology DS212j, but have been told that it does not support SATA III 6GB/s, which means I would need to look at SATA II hd's? I have had a look at some buffalo and thecus NAS devices, but they tend to have mixed reviews compared to some of the synology and qnap NAS devices i've looked at.As I am looking at getting two 2TB drives
I would prefer SATA III drives, not because of the speeds, but because SATA III drives appear to be cheaper at the higher end storage of 1-2tb drives than some SATA II drives.

Any information or advice regarding a similar two-bay NAS as the DS212j would be appreciated, or if anyone knows if the DS212j can support SATA III drives and works well in the MAC OSX environment would be great so i can explore some more options. Preferably I would like to look at NAS devices that are around the same price as the DS212j and drives that are a bit cheaper than the cost of the NAS.

 

[stevech]

I don't believe that either Synology or QNAP supports SATA 6GB in the home/SOHO products - because SATA II is more than adequate for the media content.

The Synology DS212 I believe is their top product in the home/SOHO suite. The DS212J is less costly, slower CPU and has different external I/O.

You might also consider the DS111 with a 1 or 2TB single drive and do the backup to an eSATA external drive. Not all the Synology low end NASes have eSATA. The DS212 (not j) has USB3 which is nice, but that DS212 is like $325 or so.

If the only thing you're doing is storing videos and photos, and you don't need a multi-PC shared NAS, maybe you just need a rigorous method use a pair of USB drives with one being a copy of the other. This can be done by plugging both into your PC and running software like SecondCopy. I have a USB3 external enclosure and USB3 add-in PCIe card. Faster by far than USB2 when doing big gigaByte video files.

 

[kaiowas]

Thanks Stevech, but i think because i'm streaming media over ethernet to two different devices I think I would prefer a NAS, as I'm not sure if two external drives would be recognised by my different media players if they're only plugged into the computer. But I will look into the DS111 as an alternative.

 

[Generic George]

I have been advised to look at the Synology DS212j, but have been told that it does not support SATA III 6GB/s, which means I would need to look at SATA II hd's? I have had a look at some buffalo and thecus NAS devices, but they tend to have mixed reviews compared to some of the synology and qnap NAS devices i've looked at.As I am looking at getting two 2TB drives
I would prefer SATA III drives, not because of the speeds, but because SATA III drives appear to be cheaper at the higher end storage of 1-2tb drives than some SATA II drives.

To clarify. SATA III Drives are fully compatible with a SATA II controller and vice versa. So you can use what ever you want.

However with a NAS it's a good idea to check and make sure that the drives you are looking at are on the compatibility list for the NAS you are looking at. If they aren't listed, they may well work just fine, but it's not guaranteed.

There are some issues with the > 2tb drives and some of the 1.5tb/2tb related to a change to 4k sectors on the drives, from the older 512kb standard, which is necessary because of the much larger HDD sizes, but it's essentially unrelated to SATA II/III.

Any information or advice regarding a similar two-bay NAS as the DS212j would be appreciated, or if anyone knows if the DS212j can support SATA III drives and works well in the MAC OSX environment would be great so i can explore some more options. Preferably I would like to look at NAS devices that are around the same price as the DS212j and drives that are a bit cheaper than the cost of the NAS.

Like I said above SATA version isn't really an issue. I do have a Synology 1511+ which is working very smoothly and nicely with my macs.

You really might want to put off getting HDDs for a couple of months, given the price gouging currently going on. If you need something right now, one thing you might want to try, would be to check out some of the external drives. Particularly at brick and mortar stores, since their prices are tied into ads that have a significant lead time and might not have them jacked up. With a lot of the external drives they are just internal drives in some sort of casing. So you can just remove the drive (you probably can't return them at this point, but the warranty on the drive it's self should be good) and put it into the nas. You will want to do some research as to what kind of drive you are likely to be getting in an external case for compatibility purposes though and that will involve some poking around.