Recommend me a NAS please.

[Troubleatmill]

I have an Apple TV and Mac Mini doing nothing - and was thinking about plugging in a NAS and have it store all my movies.

I could use the Apple TV as the front end - accessing the Mac Mini's movie library

The Mac Mini's hard disk is too small for a glut of movies - so need something with bigger storage.

Can someone recommend me a NAS/ Hard disk unit fast enough/ easy enough.

Thanks in advance.


Budget: Up to £500.

[Randomthoughts]

QNAP boxes have always served me well.

[gaz1234]

yep, or synology

[marctwo]

Easiest: just buy a big USB drive for your Mac Mini

Easy: Synology or Qnap NAS

Advanced: HP Microserver

[onlynik]

Having just bought a Synology 1813+ to replace a HP microserver running FreeNAS, I wouldn't recommend it.

SMB speeds are appalling, much much slower than FreeNAS on the same network infrastructure, I can't stream HD content to my laptop unless I use NFS or iSCSI.

I'd get a QNAP.

[schmunk]

onlynik said:

Having just bought a Synology 1813+ to replace a HP microserver running FreeNAS, I wouldn't recommend it.

SMB speeds are appalling, much much slower than FreeNAS on the same network infrastructure, I can't stream HD content to my laptop unless I use NFS or iSCSI.

I'd get a QNAP.

Why did you replace the microserver?


(just interested as I'm thinking about buying one myself for backup, Squeezebox and Plex).

[marctwo]

schmunk said:

(just interested as I'm thinking about buying one myself for backup, Squeezebox and Plex).

I do exactly this and it works very well indeed. I run Logitech Media Server and Plex Media Server under UnRAID.

[onlynik]

schmunk said:

Why did you replace the microserver?


(just interested as I'm thinking about buying one myself for backup, Squeezebox and Plex).

Because I needed more space, and I'm paranoid about disk failure, so in the DS1813+ I have a RAID 6 array with a hot spare (8 x 3TB), giving 13.5 TB of usable space. This also runs my Time Machine backups and a backup of my PC. The backups (and our photos and videos) are then backed up to the Crashplan central servers (which was the main reason fro choosing Synology over any other as I already have a Crashplan account.

[trooperiziz]

I have a synology, and it's pretty good. Not the fastest thing but "just works" and I can stream 1080p video content from it with no issue.

I can tell you what not to buy if that helps. Under no circumstances buy a Netgear ReadyNAS, I have one of those too and it is utter st.