Hi all,

This would probably be best in the Mac hardware section, but it'll get a better audience here, I think.

I'm looking to replace my home "server", all it currently does is serve files to a single Mac over LAN. Once upon a time it was a backup, a web server, a common place to store files required on a number of machines. Now it just serves a few NFS shares with films on.

I'm looking at some sort of external enclosure that'll hold a number of drives (4 - 6), said device should present each disk separately to the Mac so that the Mac can in turn create software RAIDs (cheaper) and partition everything up as it wants.

The drives will be used for Time Machine backups, storage of movies in mp4 format as well as the original disk images as a dvdmedia format (so I don't have to go and search our collection of DVDs if the mp4 files doesn't work first time).

JBOD springs to mind, IIRC those usually present each disk separately?

Connectivity wise, I'd be looking at FireWire 800, USB2, GigaBit Ethernet, or Thunderbolt (shudders at possible expense). Would USB2 be up to the job? Streaming a movie file while doing a TM backup?

Budget wise, I'm really not sure. I'd really like to spend less than £200 and I already have the disks...

Many thanks for any help, suggestions, comments, etc.

Ben

Can you get a TB to SATA adapter? If so, I've seen quite a few external caddies that do what you want but only to eSATA. They're usually something over £100 for 4 bays.

There are other options if you can stretch to ~£300

What's the budget?

You'll struggle to get a decent 4 disk mac compatible RAID array, whatever the interface, for £200. There are quite a few decent 2 disk ones in that price range. If there is a TB to esata interface (and I haven't seen one yet), that wouldn't be cheap.

To be honest, if you're planning to use software RAID anyway, why not just buy 4 USB disk enclosures and a hub?

Jon

Aye, I just thought a four-six disk enclosure would be tidier, and possibly offer a better interface for transporting large amounts of data...

What spec is the box you'll be using as the server?

I won't be, I'm getting rid of the server. It'll be hooked up to my Mac Pro, though I'm thinking of selling it off and getting an iMac.

I'd just get a NAS.

If you only need to connect to one machine you could use iSCSI to connect to the drives.

Either the NETGEAR ReadyNAS NV+ RND4000 NAS server or QNAP TS-412 Turbo NAS NAS server would do it

Cool, I'll take a look. Cheers Sas.

I've heard mixed things about QNAP boxes. Synology do some good stuff, but their 4 bay drives may be slightly over your budget.

Jon

I just took delivery of the ReadyNAS NV+ RND4000 (along with two 2TB HDDs, got two more at home).

Sas, you said something about updating the firmware and getting iSCSI running. Presumably this is all easy to do? Will my Mac and Faye's iPad recognise iSCSI devises? What's the best way to connect from such devises?

iSCSI is a connection over ethernet to the disks. You can only have 1 connection to each LUN. If you want to share info from these LUN's then you share it from the mac.

iPad's don't connect to NAS's very well (if at all) so that shouldn't be a problem.

You just make sure the firmware is up to date then log in to the web browser & configure it. You'll need to download an iSCSI initiator for the mac but there are some free ones out there.

Failing that stick some shares on it and anybody you grant access to the share can get on it (but not as fast as an iSCSI connection)