Viewing 12 posts - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)
  • mac/time machine/hard-drive/tv question
  • Onzadog
    Free Member

    Me and the wife both run macs at home and it’s probably a good idea to get an external hard drive and start taking advantage of time machine. We don’t fancy a time capsule as there seems to be less storage space for the money and we’ve been put off (rightly or wrongly) by tales of time capsule grave yards.

    So, can someone recommend a good external hard drive that will play with the mac and do the time machine stuff?

    Also, if I get something with silly amounts of storage, is it possible to bin my DVD player, store them all on the hard drive and then “beam” them from the hard drive, over the wifi, to the mac book pro and into the telly? Or is that a bit ambitious?

    Cheers

    simon_g
    Full Member

    Easiest route – just get a small portable hard disk each, the kind that don’t need an extra power brick. Just plug in from time to time.

    500GB ones are under £50 these days, or I bought one of these from Amazon – 1TB for under £80:

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-S2-Portable-Drive–Midnight/dp/B003UT2QTQ/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1290163620&sr=8-3

    If you get a networked drive that’s not a Time Capsule, there are ways of getting it to work over the network but it’s a bit of a bodge and doing things like a restore from the boot CD are a faff. If you want networked storage for media files, I’d get one, but in addition to your own local time machine drives.

    allthegear
    Free Member

    The Time Capsule did have an issue with the power supplies but the newer ones are quite different inside. They are expensive but do an awful lot – especially if you use it as your Internet router, too. (and even more so if you have MobileMe as well)

    It’s fab when my Time capsule hard disk and even my printer are available wherever I am in the World – really handy but quite freaky when you print from a coffee shop around the corner and the printout is waiting on your return.

    Normal USB hard drives do work well as Time Machine targets, though. You just need to plug them in. It’s best if you format the disk with the Mac HFS+ format as it can write the backups more easily. Use the Disk Tool.

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    muppetWrangler
    Free Member

    I use a fairly cheap western digital hard drive for my ‘time machine’ back up. As it is for just one mac it is connected directly via USB but I’m pretty sure you could get a decent NAS drive for about half the price of the official apple one and this should be able to handle two machines independently. Before I set up the current backup pretty much every time I plugged in an external drive the mac would ask me if I wanted to use this for time machine which makes me think that most drives would work equally well.

    As for streaming the movies, you might want to look at appleTV as the receiving connection at the TV end. If you’ve also got either an iPhone or Ipad you can control it via the ‘remote’ app.

    timwillows
    Free Member

    Just about any external USB hard drive seems to work with time machine. Just changed my set-up and now plug the drive into an airport extreme – seems like I have now almost built a timecapsule for about 1/2 the cost.
    As for video streaming you could go Apple TV. As I already had a PS3 I use Nullriver Medialink ($20) which seems functionally the same as apple TV, but not quite as slick

    gonefishin
    Free Member

    I was looking for something similar and decided on an HP Media Smart home server. Not the cheapest solution but it will do everthing that you ask for. It sits under a desk, connected to the router and happily backs up my macbook and PC with very little fuss. It also has iTunes server on it which means that you can use this instead of/as well as whats on your laptop so that you can keep the files there instaed of hogging space on the laptop. It comes with 4 drive bays so storage really shouldn’t be an issue and a built in DNLA thingy that means it can stream media over your network to any sutiable device (e.g. a games console). If you are going to stream big files though I’d recommend powerline adapters rather than wifi. Wifi works great for music but I found it too slow for TV & Movies and it was always buffering.

    The only slight problem is that the initial setup needs to be done using a PC, after that though all maintenance can be done on your Mac.

    muppetWrangler
    Free Member

    gonefishin.

    You say that the HP Media Smart has iTunes server built in. This may be an odd question but does that mean that it could wirelessly serve music to a remote source (airport / apple TV) without having to have a host computer switched on i.e the only things receiving power are the media smart and the apple TV?

    The tune selection would be done from either an iPhone or iPad.

    Sorry if this is fractionally off topic.

    gonefishin
    Free Member

    It can certainly serve a remote source without a host computer as I’ve streamed music and video to my xbox but that was using twonkymedia server (it comes with this too) without the PC being on. I wouldn’t like to say that it can definately stream to Apple TV or airport as I’ve never tried to use either of these things.

    muppetWrangler
    Free Member

    Thanks, for the above and below post.

    (edited)

    brassneck
    Full Member

    Time Machine is very flakey on non Time Capsule NAS storage, and requires a command line change to even view them, suggesting Apple aren’t all that keen on supporting such configurations.. For backup I would go with the cheap 2.5″ USB disk as above or an online service like Carbonite.

    I have it running (intermittently) on a Netgear Stora, but it was a PITA to configure and every time it breaks it starts afresh. I’d recommend more or less anything else.

    Onzadog
    Free Member

    thanks for the input so far folks.

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