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Good evening hivemind,
I'm thinking about adding around 1tb of storage to my home network, typically connected is the following:
Xbox360
MacBookPro
Ipad3
BlackBerry PlayBook
Sony Vaio P series
Dell studio xps
Various iPhones
Tvonics freeview
And a hp printer
I was going to use it for a back up device syncing to my dropbox, then got thinking about using it as a server for movies & music.
I was looking at the Western Digital my book live (2tb is a bargain £119 at the moment, is it cheap because it's shit?
What have you or what would you suggest?
I've got a ReadyNas Duo with a couple of 2TB drives in raid 1. Use it to play mkv files on the tv and music on the Sonos, as well as general file storage.
I find it does those things flawlessly, but then I expect I'm hardly a poweruser...
If you want to stream music to an iPhone I think the WD will do it. However I'd you have a Logitech device in your house the WD won't stream stuff for them so you may want to look elsewhere. As storage the WD works fine though
i got one of the WD my book live, i use it for streaming my music to a Sonos player and it works a treat.
I was pleasantly surprised at the speed which i can load stuff onto it at.
My money would eb on a windows home server - much more versitile.
not cheap, but in my experience* has been excellent:
[url= http://www.scan.co.uk/products/qnap-ts-219p-ii-2x-bay-%2825-35-sata2-hdd%29-nas-with-2ghz-cpu512mb-ddr3-1xgbit-lan-3xusb-2xesata ]Qnap 219P II[/url]
* I have the previous, lower powered version.
I've got two Buffalo Linkstation Lives - they're pretty cheap but have been rock solid - one has been streaming reliably for 18 months now. Any sub-£200 box is going to be slower than a 'real' NAS though due to processing power onboard.
Been using a Synology Discstation DS212J - impressed but seems quite spendy
I have a ReadyNAS Duo V2, seems pretty good to me, handy Android remote app too.
One thing though, for some reason we struggle to stream .avi films from it, via the wi-fi & x-box. Not sure why as using my PC tower we can stream them ok. I plan to ethernet everything using homeplugs so hopefully that will be remedied
check the compatibility of the nas if you are running lion on the mb pro as the netgear stora won't work but the ready nas will if you want to use time machine. I've got a ready has duo with two 1tb hard drives and it seems to work nicely with ps3, toshiba laptop, macbook pro and tv.
D_R make sure you Duo has the latest firmware, and search through the extra firmware updates for specific patch/updates for your model.
You'd assume that by updating the 'main' firmware everything will be upto date... I found that this is not the case & only got media streaming with my Duo (v1) by upgrading a particular patch (canne remember which).
Have to say though the Duo does what I want & has been pretty damned reliable, it's not been the most user friendly device (and definitely not quick to transfer to/from). Patches, updates and firmware upgrade galore.