How To Select Network Attached Drive With Home Theater PC

This article discusses how network attached storage can improve your media center experience.

User of Mac Mini are increasingly facing the need to share the media files over the computers in the home network. Some might even want to stream iTunes music without turning on the computer. We all have different requirements for an additional storage, but as the need for more storage increases it often needs to be accessible from more than one place. This is where a Network Hard Drive (also know as Network Attached Storage NAS) become very tempting option.

Gigabit Ethernet

After trying with my old Ethernet router I realized that both wireless and 100MB Ethernet felt quite sluggish especially if I wanted to work with HD video files. After buying a new gigabit router (Apple Airport Extreme), the network hard drive read and write speed felt about the same as using computer’s own internal hard drive. So upgrading your home network to 1000MB Ethernet really makes a difference, particularly as gigabit routers are not so expensive anymore.

Two Hard Drives in RAID 1

It is important not to use only one external hard drive to store your backups. If your backup hard drive fails, you will lose all your data. Thus, I recommend having at least two hard drives in RAID operation.

RAID 1 is the main setup most beginners considering buying a network hard drive should now about. RAID 1 writes, or mirrors, data to multiple disks, so you will have multiple hard drives with the exactly same data. This way if one hard drive fails, you still have another copy. Buying two or more hard drives can feel a little costly, but remember that losing your data will be extremely costly.

Synology Network Hard Drive

I use Synology DS209+ Network Hard Drive with 2 x 1TB hard drives inside. If you have a Mac, you can also use Synology as a Time Machine. Synology also provides a good backup software for Windows. Synology is quite expensive and might feel difficult to use for networking beginners, but it offers excellent throughput speed and nearly all the features you could ever need from a network hard drive.

One simple, but important feature that many external hard drives do not have is that Synology shuts down the hard drives after certain time of inactivity. Then it automatically turns hard drives on if you search any data from the hard drive. Lacking this functionality can be very annoying with external hard drives as you need separately turn them on when you need to access data.

Synology has also made mapping a hard drive very easy on Windows machines with their Synology Assistant. This is particularly useful for beginners who do not know how to map network drives in Windows.

There a lot of features packed with the Synology hard drives iTunes server functionality being one of the useful ones. This means that you can stream your iTunes music on any computer with iTunes without turning on the computer where your media files would normally locate. In practice, iTunes server functionality is nice, but not necessary in my setup.

Lastly, here is a useful tip as a take away. You can easily make a network drive available on iTunes or other media players by adding a shortcut into the iTunes folder pointing to the network hard drive. E.g. you create Podcasts shortcut into iTunes Music folder pointing to a folder located on the network hard drive. This way all your Podcasts will be automatically downloaded into a network hard drive instead of your computer’s own.

So in summary, I recommend considering getting a network hard drive with a RAID 1 mirroring functionality to share media files across the digital living room while ensuring that everything is safely backed up.

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