Storing ALL itunes media from a remote location/NAS..

[-GoBengals-]

soo..... my itunes media folder is approaching 650GB... i have apple TV's all over the house to stream movies, music, everything to any of them..

 

my annoyances..

 

1. since its all on my laptop, i have to leave my laptop ON and propped open at all times..

 

2. its taking a large portion of my 1TB hard drive.. which is sort of annoying.. but not the end of the world. when i dub the bengals games, i use 5gb of storage each. so during the season i have about 100GB used with that stuff here or there.. and with the itunes and my normal stuff, im doing to 10% of my drive space available. thats annoying..

 

so i need to do one of two things...

 

1. figure out a way to store my entire itunes library on a drive attached to my airport extreme...

 

2. wait until i buy a mac mini for my office, run the library from THERE, in a usb 3.0 or lightening attached external hard drive - thing is, thats a $800 computer, $200 monitor, and $150 external drive, after i get the basement done 3-6 months away...probably closer to six..

 

 

so if there is a logical easy way for #1... i would rather do that for now... as no cost would be involved, i have a 2tb usb drive available now..

 

thoughts? ideas?

[ValleyBengal]

Just a question why you have to keep your laptop lid propped open? So it doesn't go to sleep? You should be able to configure lid close actions to avoid that.

 

I have little experience with Airport extreme, but I you can attach drives to your wireless router now. I have a higher end Wireless AC router with a 3.0 USB port and have a drive attached as a physical network drive. I bought a 3.0 drive really cheap. I have itunes configure so the default itunes media folder is on this physical network drive. Most newer routers you can prioritze the streams as well if they come from the attached drive.The transfer/streaming speed isn't mindblowing and doesn't approach wired network speeds, but enough for home networking and HD movie playback. The transfer of your library will take a while though.

 

http://store.linksys.com/Routers/Linksys-EA6700-App-Enabled-AC-Dual-Band-Wireless-Router-with-Gigabit_stcVVproductId153081406VVcatId551966VVviewprod.htm

 

There are also solutions like Drobo or Buffalo Netstation which can act as network attached storage that act like physical drives on your computer.

[-GoBengals-]

Just a question why you have to keep your laptop lid propped open? So it doesn't go to sleep? You should be able to configure lid close actions to avoid that.

 

I have little experience with Airport extreme, but I you can attach drives to your wireless router now. I have a higher end Wireless AC router with a 3.0 USB port and have a drive attached as a physical network drive. I bought a 3.0 drive really cheap. I have itunes configure so the default itunes media folder is on this physical network drive. Most newer routers you can prioritze the streams as well if they come from the attached drive.The transfer/streaming speed isn't mindblowing and doesn't approach wired network speeds, but enough for home networking and HD movie playback. The transfer of your library will take a while though.

 

http://store.linksys.com/Routers/Linksys-EA6700-App-Enabled-AC-Dual-Band-Wireless-Router-with-Gigabit_stcVVproductId153081406VVcatId551966VVviewprod.htm

 

There are also solutions like Drobo or Buffalo Netstation which can act as network attached storage that act like physical drives on your computer.

 

pretty much the sleep mode issue, and i would prefer it DOEs go to sleep when i close it, but with the media ON that computer, it needs to be on to allow access to the media..

 

also my router goes to a 24 port switch, and then to every room in the house,.so i actually have hard wires nearly every non-portable device in the house for streaming and transfer purposes.. which is another advantage to what im trying to do, cause right now itsstreaming wireless to the router and then hard wired to the apple tv... unless i plug in my macbook pro, which isnt going to happen..

 

i have read horror stories about the itunes library not showing up after a few days once its external because the macbook or whatever rewrites the library file if something accidentally gets added to the local itunes folder on the computer, etc..

 

i feel like waiting on the mac mini is the easiest solution, but i would love to have a central hub to dump everything to...

 

the airport extreme does have uSB ports to attached drive to be shared on the network...  i may go with a synology setup at some point in the near future..

 

but dropping $300-400 on NAS isnt in the cards anytime REAL soon.

[|Elflocko|]

 

pretty much the sleep mode issue, and i would prefer it DOEs go to sleep when i close it, but with the media ON that computer, it needs to be on to allow access to the media..

 

also my router goes to a 24 port switch, and then to every room in the house,.so i actually have hard wires nearly every non-portable device in the house for streaming and transfer purposes.. which is another advantage to what im trying to do, cause right now itsstreaming wireless to the router and then hard wired to the apple tv... unless i plug in my macbook pro, which isnt going to happen..

 

i have read horror stories about the itunes library not showing up after a few days once its external because the macbook or whatever rewrites the library file if something accidentally gets added to the local itunes folder on the computer, etc..

 

i feel like waiting on the mac mini is the easiest solution, but i would love to have a central hub to dump everything to...

 

the airport extreme does have uSB ports to attached drive to be shared on the network...  i may go with a synology setup at some point in the near future..

 

but dropping $300-400 on NAS isnt in the cards anytime REAL soon.

 

Ha!  You'll pay that much just for the NAS.

 

I'm scoping out a 4-bay Synology with 4TB drives so I have 12TB usable with a hot spare.  That's going to set me back a good $1200.

 

Unless of course you don't want any redundancy, but who wouldn't want that, right... ?

[-GoBengals-]

 

Ha!  You'll pay that much just for the NAS.

 

I'm scoping out a 4-bay Synology with 4TB drives so I have 12TB usable with a hot spare.  That's going to set me back a good $1200.

 

Unless of course you don't want any redundancy, but who wouldn't want that, right... ?

 

i was thinking the 2 bay with 2x 3-4 tb drives, which would be $375-525 on amazon/newegg...

 

sadly "carpeting" and "ceiling tiles" and "furniture" are ahead of my geek dreams...

[CincyInDC]

I just bought an empty netgear 4-bay NAS but I'm still waiting for it to arrive.  The plan is to put 2 x 3TB mirrored drives in.  When I need more space, I'll buy another 3TB drive and switch to RAID 5.  Hopefully this does the trick for a while.

[mongo]

I'm going the Mac Mini route. It's relatively cheap, low powered, small, and solves all the problems at once. Even after you find the right NAS setup, you need something connected to it that's running OS X and iTunes. Right?

[-GoBengals-]

I'm going the Mac Mini route. It's relatively cheap, low powered, small, and solves all the problems at once. Even after you find the right NAS setup, you need something connected to it that's running OS X and iTunes. Right?

 

yep,so if i go mac mini, i will just physically plug a drive into it for the itunes, or just do dual 1TB drives in it, and use one just for media...  looks like 2TB 2.5" drives are becoming a real thing..  so maybe a 250GB solid state and a 2TB standard drive in the mini..  that would be ideal..

 

problem being, i would prefer to use with computer for chopping and uploading the bengals videos i do..so i would probably have to go with the $799 mac mini, for both me and my wife.. which eliminates some of the cost effectiveness...since it gives you the quad core i7 instead of the dual core i5.. and probably 16GB ram in each, too..

 

having  a nice screaming little mac mini for both of our needs...

[|Elflocko|]

I'm going the Mac Mini route. It's relatively cheap, low powered, small, and solves all the problems at once. Even after you find the right NAS setup, you need something connected to it that's running OS X and iTunes. Right?

 

Some NAS' (such as Synology) come with an iTunes server built in.

 

Just something to keep in mind... 

[mullichicken25]

The Synology DiskStations are the bees knees, and i cant recomend them enough, but if you're just looking to stream music in your house then a drive plugged into your airport extreme should do the trick. I'm pretty sure you can setup time machine to automatically back everything up on there as well which is nice.

 

i though about doing that for a while but apparently it doesn't handle streaming HD video very well which ultimately led to the synology NAS...plus some basic redundancy is nice to have. Its nice not worrying about losing all my music, pictures, videos, and documents if a harddrive takes a shit.

[CincyInDC]

the cheaper Netgear NAS I just got works as promised.  It doesn't have as many bells and whistles but it has all the features I need at home, which is basically RAID and a windows/smb share.  It does have an iTunes server as well, but I didn't bother turning that on.

 

Now a NAS with a standalone active directory server built in would pique my interest at work...

[Ron~Popeil]

I work for Apple and know there are a LOT of people buying up old minis from place like ebay and using them as servers. You can pick them up for less than $100. Add an external hard drive and you have a decent size storage device at a pretty decent price. 

[-GoBengals-]

So if the synology has its own itunes server built in... and i am storing my entire itunes library on there. 

 

Can i store multiple itunes accounts on there?

 

how do I add new media? if i "buy" a few new albums and movies and tv shows, do i just add them to my itunes on my omputer which moves them there or do i access the synology and put them in the right folders?

[-GoBengals-]

ok i did some more digging on synology site.. so i assign a shared itunes account login to the synology and any computer logged into any itunes with that same account info, can access all of that media..

 

correct?

 

so same first question, can I have a second itunes account, so like my wifes crap from her itunes, for her 2-3 computers and my itunes with my stuff for my 2-3 computers, while 100% of it is all stored on the synology?

 

thats possible them, eh?

[Ron~Popeil]

ok i did some more digging on synology site.. so i assign a shared itunes account login to the synology and any computer logged into any itunes with that same account info, can access all of that media..

 

correct?

 

so same first question, can I have a second itunes account, so like my wifes crap from her itunes, for her 2-3 computers and my itunes with my stuff for my 2-3 computers, while 100% of it is all stored on the synology?

 

thats possible them, eh?

It should be. If you want it completely separated you can partition the hard drive of the storage unit and run it as separate servers. 

[-GoBengals-]

It should be. If you want it completely separated you can partition the hard drive of the storage unit and run it as separate servers. 

 

can i still partition a small part off if i have 4 drives with raid setup?

 

i guess i could just use the 2TB external drive as another drive seperate from my raid setup.. plugged into the USB on the synology..

[Ron~Popeil]

 

can i still partition a small part off if i have 4 drives with raid setup?

 

i guess i could just use the 2TB external drive as another drive seperate from my raid setup.. plugged into the USB on the synology..

 

It depends a bit on what kind of raid setup you have but generally you should be able to partition it. Partitions do eat up a lot of space because of head room so you might be better off using the separate 2tb drive.