Help with external hard drives for my iMac.

[baldrick]

Originally Posted by screemer

i have a growing number of music, films and pics on my iMac. i want an external HDD both to put them on and to back them up to. Am i best going for the time capsule with wireless access etc or just a firewire drive like a WD one? i want to be able to stili access the content on my Apple tv when i get it.

Is there a definitive answer about 'off-line' support for ATV?

For Screemer - The ATV is an extension of iTunes with the ability to store info locally to save running your Mac 24/7. If all your iTunes content is on an external HDD you can either sync iTunes and store upto the capacity of your ATV (40GB or 160GB) locally, or you can stream it from the external drive via iTunes. I don't think you can stream direct from the external drive to the ATV. (Does that make sense?)

As for other comment re. storage v. backup, if you put you entire iTunes library on an external drive and it fails you will lose it all. Personally I use a Wester Digital dual disk enclosure running as a 500GB mirror, so that's one box containing 2 x 500GB drives but my iMac only sees 1 x 500GB. When my iMac writes to the drive, the drive automatically puts the info onto both drives. This way if 1 drive fails the data is protected.

[richard plumb]

which one? I like that idea - i want backups of my media but without the aggro of manually setting it all up. The day you forget to back up is the day it fails.

You can stream direct from an external drive providing a Mac is still the source. eg I have an external usb drive attached to my time capsule with my media on. My itunes library on my MBP points to it. I can stream that from my appleTV, but my MBP has to be on as the 'host' itunes library.

you can stream directly-directly (i.e. no faffing about) if you have boxee/XBMC installed and use SMB (or a directly attached USB drive)

With boxee installed you can also ftp content directly to the appleTV hard drive and play it locally without needing to have synced it from itunes. So that could be used as a backup solution - have one copy on the appleTV and one on a separate hard drive. If you have a vanilla appleTV with content on, and your original media drive fails, I don't think you can pull the content off the appleTV.

[baldrick]

Originally Posted by richard plumb

which one? I like that idea - i want backups of my media but without the aggro of manually setting it all up. The day you forget to back up is the day it fails.

I use the WD My Book Studio Dual Drive and run it as a RAID 1 mirror. Alternatively WD now make a 'My Book Mirror Edition' which is a USB only version.

The good thing with these drives is that the RAID manager is built into the drive. An alternative would be to get 2 USB/FW drives and create a RAID 1 volume via OS X. You would see a single drive in Finder eg. 'Media Store' but when you moved anything onto this volume OS X would automatically write the data onto both drives....

[richard plumb]

I like that second idea too - especially as I have a couple of 750GB maxtor USB drives sitting not doing a great deal. Is software raid reliable enough on OSX do you know? and does it alert you to drive failures?

[baldrick]

Originally Posted by richard plumb

I like that second idea too - especially as I have a couple of 750GB maxtor USB drives sitting not doing a great deal. Is software raid reliable enough on OSX do you know? and does it alert you to drive failures?

I used it for a while. I bought a dual disk enclosure that could either be run as a hardware RAID 0 or set to mount as two 500GB drives. I did the latter and soft RAIDed them as a 500GB mirror and it worked fine.

I don't know off the top of my head about drive failures etc... I guess you could configure it and before you start using it power down one of the drives and see what happens!?!?