My 500gb lacie external mac mini storage unit decided it was no longer going to work :o(
The fault seemed to be with the bus interface of the casing, rather than the drive itself. The drive is a bulk standard ide drive which gets converted to a usb port connection on the outside of the case via an internal cross connector.
First off I tried connecting the device to a PC instead of the Mac to see if anything could be seen/salvaged at all (the Mac mini’s role is an mp3 file repository for the Sonos wireless hi-fi units around the home……no Mac mini = no music !! gaaaaaaahhhhhhh :o(
I opened the case and extracted the physical drive and connected it to a PC using a standard ide cable. The PC recognised the drive no problem, but clearly Windows does not understand the Mac OSX file system without some help.
Luckily, macdrive to the rescue. Once installed I could read all files on the mac volume and was able to copy them across to a more reliable drive.
Next step was to provide new storage. Almost losing 10 years worth of music collecting was quite a panic, so I wanted the new solution to provide some piece of mind. enter the Qnap TS209 Pro II nas server.
The device costs just under £230 from scan.co.uk without drives. Offically Qnap only support the device with 1tb drives fitted, but I have seen reports of people running them with 1.5TB drives (probably 2TB drives by now !). A pair of 1tb seagate drives cost £63 each so the whole thing came in for under £400.
The device is small enough to fit into the little cupboard next to my media unit and runs almost silent, even during write operations. The device is powered by a marvell cpu running at 500Mhz and configuration is managed by a well designed web interface.
Embedded applications include ftp server, web server, mysql database server and more, although I don’t need any of these as I just need somewhere to dump files. Having x2 drives the configuration options are either RAID 0 striping across the x2, which will improve read/write performance, but provides no resiliency, or RAID 1 mirroring which halves the total storage capacity but provides piece of mind.
The initial setup requires a direct ethernet connection from a PC/Mac directly into the units ethernet port. Once you have assigned the device a tcp/ip address you can connect it to the network and finish the setup.
You have the option to select either NTFS, FAT and EXT3 filesystems so you can use it with both PC and Mac/Linux/Unix systems. My only gripe with it would be the pre-configured shares defined on the system. There are shares such as Qdownload, Qweb, Qusb etc. etc. (you get the idea) that you cannot remove. You can however mark the shares as hidden so they don’t show up on the network so this is not a major show stopper.
Performance seems ok. The device has been handling simultaneous read/write requests from me, my flatmate, a visiting friend, a x3 sonos wi-fi players without any blips or stutters. All in all, money well spent and I sleep much better at night knowing my data is duplicated.
I think I will try to recommend this post to my friends and family, cuz it’s really helpful.
[...] so it came to pass, the awesome Qnap TS209 Pro II that I purchased and lovingly installed last year, is almost full [...]