...because I am getting to the point of being stuck. And I just can not make up my mind what the best direction to take is. BTW, we live in a fairly large 2 story home with a basement. Below is the hardware by room...

Living Room (1st Floor)

• Main TV
• PS3 (main BR player)
• Apple TV 3
• Western Digital Live Media Player
• Internet & Buffalo 300NH router

Basement

• TV (has cable & a BR player, finished area)
• Mac Mini G5 + 19" LCD (wifi, workshop area)

Garage

• Mac Mini 1G C2D + 19" LCD (wifi)

Office (2nd Floor)

• 27" iMac i5 (main computer)

Portables

• iPad and a two iPhone 5

Well I am completely out of storage space. The iMac only offers 1TB internally and I have several 2TB external drives and a few smaller 1TB or 500GB drives. Everything is full. Yes I am a movie, tv show, music hoarder. Once my warranty runs out on the iMac, which is soon, I'll be going to a smaller SSD internally. Shrinking down even more...

My second problem is playing media on the main TV. At the apartment I just transcoded everything on my iMac and played it via the PS3. If I had a 1080 rip with good audio (DTS HD, DD, etc) I would transfer to an external HDD and physically connect it to my WD media player. I love that player in that it will play anything I throw at it. The part that I don't like is the metadata sucks and I have to physically move and transfer files to a HDD. I ignored that because for the most part the iMac to PS3 process worked. It was hard wired on the LAN so it could handle most things.

For the sake of this post it is impossible for me to run cat5 upstairs to the office. So the iMac is wireless N up a story and on the other side of the house from the router. For browsing, downloading, streaming music to the AT3 it's fine and works great. I just can't stream video reliably from it.

So in short, what's the best way to handle storage with the idea of wanting to play media from it on the main TV?

Part of me wants to just buy a Synology NAS and keep it by the main TV/router. That way it's wired to the lan, close to the TV so I can physically connect a media player to it (no ethernet). But then I read the performance and unless you drop serious coin, I'm not sure it's enough.

So then I look at a new mac mini with a huge USB3 external HDD or a raid enclosure.

Christ I don't know. Ideas?

Cliffs:

• Need 6TB+ in one location
• Need to be able to download directly to and then stream/play media directly from that storage
• Everything is wifi EXCEPT things right next to main TV
• Ease of use, metadata, etc should be considered

 

Yes they are slower than a PC but are plenty fast to stream media. Where mine will choke up is if I have multiple clients hitting it with large copy jobs. I have a DS411j. I've used mine to stream DVD over wifi to my WD media player without any problem. I haven't yet tried 1080p on it though.

They all run the same software. The faster ones may have some extra features like support for more IP cameras than the entry level ones.

The "J" models are single core and I do notice that mine will go to 100% CPU when it has a large file copy operation. If you go to the next level up you can get one with dual core. Here is an easy way to compare them. http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index...es_my_NAS_have

 

I was looking at the DS413 and 413J...

But then I think about it and that's basically Mac Mini or a custom machine level prices... ($500+)

I could combine a HTPC and NAS...

 

Only problem with mac mini is you may end up needing to add external storage to it. Another interesting item in this price range is the HP Micro Server. It's probably faster than the NAS but it's more of a "roll your own" solution instead of pull it out of the box and go. I don't think it ships with an OS but it could run Windows or Linux based on whatever special need you may have.

 

What about the Thunderbolt hard drives?

 

If it was me, I would get the new Airport Extreme and a 6TB USB 2.0 drive (I see a lot of cheaper 4TB) and connect it to the Airport.

 

The new APE or Time Capsule doesn't do any streaming, doesn't really have apps, and USB 2.0 is fairly slow...

Yea Austin but TB HDDs are crazy expensive.

 

Do you have a budget for this?

Anything you do is going to be a cost/complexity/performance tradeoff.

My druthers is to go with a higher-end server solution that can do what you want today and anything else you want to throw at it for the next ten years. I don't know how that aligns with your preferences though.

 

I built an htpc/nas for my condo. Plenty flexible and works with all devices. Only downside was the initial setup to dial in sharing so it works on everything. Now it's rocksolid and never fails, just sits there working. I've got 7TB of media in it on a mirrored array for albeit expensive redundancy. Here's what my setup looks like:

Cable Modem (running in bridge mode)
- New Apple time capsule (ac) via cat 6
- Apple TV via cat 6
- HTPC/Server via cat 6
- WD TV Live via cat 6

On the wireless side i have:
Airport express as a network repeater
wdtv live
2 Macbooks Airs, 2 iphones, 1 ipad, and my work PC.

On this setup anything on the HTPC/Server can be viewed on any tv, wd live box, or the mba's. Get's the job done for me, and I don't have to worry about shuffling files around.

 

I'd say I want to spend no more then $800 on this... :/

I think a custom NAS/HTPC is probably going to be the way to go.

 

you can get started pretty cheap...case, mobo, ram, and just recycle the drives you have, then add capacity as needed.