I quite like the sound of the HP Microserver but I think it would be a bit of overkill for my needs and burn a bit more electricity, I'll have a look at the Synology boxes to see if any of them will suit my needs.

Thanks all for the advice - I won't hold you all personally responsible if when I buy one - it's rubbish :think: .

Does anyone use a Synology NAS with OS X???

Looking for a bit of help using my 212j with Time Machine. :think:

No personal experience, but there's a page on their wiki about setting it up...

http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index.php/Backup_Mac_data_using_Time_Machine

Chris

Thanks Chris.

That's no help at all as the options I'm meant to be selecting are not available to me :(

I would recommend a Buffalo Station. We used this for our MD who insisted on storing music, photos etc on the corp network. Worked very well

My experience of Buffalo products has been very poor, and sadly the same applies to everyone I know.

I personally have a 4 year old Infrant/Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ currently (4 x 750gb), so that is a bit small by the modern view of the world, but seems to work suitably well for my needs (backup and streaming to my tv).

I was looking at replacing it as soon it will be full to capacity and being the age of the unit it won't go above 4 x 2tb disks :-( I was thinking HP Microserver, 4 x 3tb, and booting off a small ssd, probably running NAS4Free

I use a netgear readynas duo and we have the same at work <br /><br />Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2<br /><br /><br />

Buffalo stuff is ****. We had 2 fail on us within the first year and the third bricked itself a few weeks ago - 18 months old.

That is now in the bin and we have a 3TB WD MyBook Live. All good so far, happily backs up 2 x iMacs, 1 x rMBP (time machine) and 3 x Win7 Home Premium laptops (VHD workaround win backup). Plan to mirror the NAS drive at some stage with an empty NAS enclosure and some decent drives.

Does anyone use a Synology NAS with OS X???

Looking for a bit of help using my 212j with Time Machine.

Yup, no problems unless your Mac cannot connect to the NAS for any reason.

Create a volume on the NAS for TM to use, mount the volume on your Mac, then tell TM that you want to use that volume for TM backups, job done. Just make sure the account you use to log in to the NAS has full access to the volume you want to use.

Edited 14 January, 201313 yr by hertsnminds

As I see it, there are three kinds of solutions out there:

1 - The "cheap (and potentially nasty)" all-in-one boxes such as the cheap netgear boxes, raidsonic / icybox NAS devices, etc.

These pretty much all run a small customised version of Linux. What you have to watch out for are proprietary file systems as others have pointed out. Being able to take the drives out and readin in a normal PC is a godsend if the box self-destructs and there's no decent support for it. Also, the feature set might be limited and you don't necessarily have the option to add other stuff.

2 - The "cheap and incredibly flexible if you put some effort into it". This is where the Microserver comes in. Yes, you have to put your OS of choice (either WHS or some form of Linux). It's flexible as you have a full-blown OS so can do pretty much anything a normal PC could do: you're not limited to whatever protocols / features the simpler solutions (1, above) provide.

3 - The "expensive, but sexy and easy". This is for your Synology kind of devices. They're very nice, are well supported and have a great feature set. They might use a custom OS, but many plugins are available making them just about as flexible as option 2, but without the headache of having to configure it yourself. Only downside: the cost can be quite high.

I've been using a Microserver (the earlier 36NL box) and have added a HP P410i hardware RAID card with 512MB to give live RAID migration, and a dedicated intel PCIe NIC as the onboard one can be pants - mine would crash when moving TB of data at a time. I love it, but then again, I've spent some time tweaking (and admittedly the cost of the RAID card is more than the whole server).

My experience of Buffalo products has been very poor, and sadly the same applies to everyone I know.

Same here. I have one Buffalo and one Synology here.

Synology has been working for the past couple of years absolutely fine. Took me 15 minutes to setup, and haven't changed anything since.

Buffalo is a pos to configure and administer. The web panel configuration page is illogical and makes no sense at times.

Buffalo is a pos to configure and administer. The web panel configuration page is illogical and makes no sense at times.

My Buffalo, when it worked, was slow and evil. I am quite pleased it bricked itself during an upgrade exercise as I was then able to buy something decent to replace it with :-)