Just looking at a NAS drive to store everything (pictures, films, music etc). I am looking at some that claim to work well with iTunes and I was just wondering if anyone has any experience of it?

Basically I want to be able to stream music held on the NAS drive via my phone, iPad etc (I would do this with the device playing the music wirelessly over my home network).

I tried this once using our laptop (which has all the music on at the moment) but it kept stalling/losing the music etc when it was playing back.

Any experiences / recommendations very much appreciated.

Standard answer to “what NAS?” questions is Synology or Qnap. I have a Synology 4 bay which houses my iTunes, and it hasn’t missed a beat in 4 years.

Remember though, that raid is redundancy, not backup. If the NAS catches fire or otherwise sh*ts-the-bed, you will lose everything.

I am not thinking about it as a ‘backup’ more of a way of having all my music, films, photos etc available on all devices.

Is there a better way of managing this?

NAS is ideal for this. Low power consumption, always on and many built in apps and servers. As above, I went Qnap, Synology was the other option.

I can access content from desktop, laptops, phones and smart TVs, it’s all in one place and easy to manage and backup (both to an from).

My first NAS had slower transfer speed than my LAN due to poor CPU being the weak link. A faster dual core CPU NAS is much better and handles HD streaming easily and sped up file transfers.

Echo the above NAS is brilliant for this, have re-digitised all my CD’s and some DVD’s, downloads etc and backed up our photos to the NAS now anyone can play anything anywhere in the house. I went Synology 2 bay, wanted the 4 but couldn’t really afford it but when I think back to spending £’000’s on DVD players/CD spinners/record decks etc not sure why I didn’t get a 4 bay.

If you wanted to have a back up then just buy an external drive (USB 3 on both ends would be pretty useful for this) and store the backup somewhere out of your house.

I’ve got a Synology and just set up the Cloud Station option to replicate my iTunes library.
Music is all on my PC, with music folders replicated to the NAS. Means it’s all backed up and I have quite a large amount of songs now available on DS Audio 🙂

The location defined for my iTunes library is on my Drobo 5N. iTunes sharing only works if my Mac is on, although Plex running on the Drobo itself (looking at those folders) serves to share out music and video if the mac isn’t on.

Although I did recently subscribe to iTunes Match and just streaming my own music is quicker and easier most of the time.