[MAC] Looking for Suggestions to Improve My Growing Set-up
#1
I am looking for better ideas about serving media and backing up.

My current set-up is an iMac streaming to xbmc on an ATV2. Since discovering xbmc and the ATV2 connection a couple of weeks ago, I’ve started ripping my dvds as we now prefer streaming over using our crappy dvd player. So, I’m going to need more disk capacity. Right now, the videos are being saved to two small external drives I had lying around. The iMac is backed up using Time Machine to a third external usb drive.

My initial thought was swapping out the hd on the iMac but that’s not scalable, if, for example, I started saving my dvds as iso’s. My two biggest needs are disk space for photo files and videos. I’m thinking about moving the photos and videos to an unRaid server and continue to use an external drive for Time Machine for the core stuff on the Mac (system, music, documents, etc.). Does this make sense? Are there other options I might look into? Open to any suggestions; this is all new to me.
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#2
If your serious about it just build a unRAID server. If I got a case half the price of mine it will have cost under £200 minus the Hard Drives. You can scale it up to 20 drives giving you 40TB.
If you added a 4 bay DAS to your iMac you would still be looking at £100-£150 and then where do you go from there?
A 4 bay NAS would be even dearer.
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#3
Uncle Ned Wrote:My initial thought was swapping out the hd on the iMac but that’s not scalable, if, for example, I started saving my dvds as iso’s. My two biggest needs are disk space for photo files and videos. I’m thinking about moving the photos and videos to an unRaid server and continue to use an external drive for Time Machine for the core stuff on the Mac (system, music, documents, etc.). Does this make sense? Are there other options I might look into? Open to any suggestions; this is all new to me.

I am not a mac user but I believe that the latest beta version of unRAID supports AFP and Time Machine backups. As far as scalability goes, unRAID is just about the best solution you're going to find that is cheap and easy to expand. Like T800 said, if you are serious about having a lot of media then your best option is to build your own server.
HTPC: Win 7 Home 64-bit | MB | CPU | GPU | RAM | Case | PSU | Tuner | HDDs: OS, Media | DVD Burner | Remote
Media server: unraid 4.7 | CPU | MB | RAM | Case | PSU | HDDs: Parity-2TB, Data-2x2TB
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#4
It all depends on your capacity needs (?) in the next 3 years and your budget (?).
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[MAC] Looking for Suggestions to Improve My Growing Set-up0