NAS vs. Mac Mini w\ Thunderbolt Drives?

[joepimentel]

So I'm running out of space to store my media (movies, shows, photos, music, etc.) and I've been contemplating a NAS. However, after thinking my needs and what I'd really like to get out of it I'm now leaning more towards a new Mac Mini with a few Thunderbolt Drives (when they come out). My current set up is two USB2 500GB drives that are mirrored using SuperDuper! and a nightly schedule. What I would like is:

- Speed. USB2 is slow, especially as I'm starting to save movies and shows in HD. Gigabit over my network seems fast enough for me when I've copied files between two computers (I could care less that I need to be wired). Thunderbolt speeds would be awesome. Firewire 800 seems okay but I see it as an older and eventually dying technology now that Thunderbolt and USB3 are out.

- Space. 3TB of usable space at a minimum.

- Redundancy. 3TB is a lot of data to lose so I need to make sure I have a way of protecting against drive failure. RAID would be nice (even if it's only software RAID) but I can even live with my current SuperDuper! set up if I went the Mac Mini route.

- Expandability. I'm currently thinking of 2 drives but something that allows for more drives in the future would be awesome.

- Extensibility. At the minimal I'd like for the solution to run Sabnzbd, Couch Potato, and SickBeard with no problem. Having it do some Handbrake conversions will be nice. At the moment, I could care less about some of the user management features that come with NAS devices since this is for a simple home network.

- Other. I would like to possibly include some media player functionality. If I had a NAS I'd go with an Apple TV or Western Digital TV Live Hub. If I had the Mac Mini I'd just run Plex or XBMC on it.

- Price. My budget is roughly $1,000 (before tax).

At first I thought about buying a Synology DS710+ or a Synology DS411+II (or even something from QNAP). Those two models seem to be pretty fast (90+MB/s read and write speeds from what I've read) and seem to be able to run Sabnzbd, Couch Potato and SickBeard. I still don't know if I would have to buy 7200 RPM drives or if 5400 RPM drives would saturate the gigabit link on those models. Also, I'm not sure how easy I could get HandBrake to run on it since everything I managed to find online about getting it to work seemed more complicated than I would have liked. Then the new Mac Mini came out and I started thinking that it would be great to serve the needs as the "brain" for my storage and media player needs and I could always tack on as many Thunderbolt drives as I need. I could get all the apps I want to work fairly easily and have better CPU and RAM. Of course, I would lose the benefits of hardware RAID and my bottleneck would still be Gigabit but at least my investment in Thunderbolt drives would be better than buying USB2 storage. Of course the problem is… Thunderbolt drives don't exist YET and I'm not sure how long I'd have to wait for them or what their price would be.

I'm new to NAS devices in general but I've thought about this as much as I could but I can't come to a decision. Would the NAS be a better solution or would it be more than I need since I don't need much of the services and management features they provide? Would I be missing out on anything if I go the Mac Mini route? Any advice, things to consider, or comments would help.

Thanks.

 

[claykin]

Thunderbolt storage solutions already exist. Here's a link to Apple's accessories page that shows several Promise RAID solutions using Thunderbolt.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/ho...ge?n=thunderbolt&mco=MjMwNDE5OTQ&s=topSellers

Other solutions should be coming soon. LaCie for example has page that discusses their Big Disk with SSD disks.

Keep in mind that even though Thunderbolt is 10Gb/s theoretical, it will be limited by the speed of the disks. Promise is touting 500MB/s with their RAID solution. I suspect that is running RAID0. Do you research first. Thunderbolt is very new.

 

[GregN]

Keep in mind that even though Thunderbolt is 10Gb/s theoretical, it will be limited by the speed of the disks. Promise is touting 500MB/s with their RAID solution. I suspect that is running RAID0. Do you research first. Thunderbolt is very new.

I can attest to this, Ol'Shuck (Fibre SAN) which has a 4Gbs fibre link can only achieve only 360 or so megabytes per second, with more caching and process muscle behind the disks than any NAS vendor will provide. Still better than 1Gbs Ether.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Thunderbolt is not shared, making this a direct attached solution. If you want to share the disks with more than one machine, you're stuck with net speed for any other machines accessing the storage.


Addendum: Looked at the Promise info page, they spec out two thunderbolt ports, can each port go to a different machine, is the FS mediated?

 

[joepimentel]

Thunderbolt storage solutions already exist. Here's a link to Apple's accessories page that shows several Promise RAID solutions using Thunderbolt.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/ho...ge?n=thunderbolt&mco=MjMwNDE5OTQ&s=topSellers

Other solutions should be coming soon. LaCie for example has page that discusses their Big Disk with SSD disks.

Keep in mind that even though Thunderbolt is 10Gb/s theoretical, it will be limited by the speed of the disks. Promise is touting 500MB/s with their RAID solution. I suspect that is running RAID0. Do you research first. Thunderbolt is very new.

That Promise solution is way more than I need in terms of RAID hardware.

I know that 10Gb/s of Thunderbolt is theoretical but since I'm looking at attaching the drives to a Mac Mini and then sharing them over my Gigabit network I assume that as long as I get 1Gb/s from the drives then I'll be fine because the bottleneck would be my network. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm just thinking that by going the Mac Mini route I could just continue to add more drives and eventually even do some type of software RAID as needed.

What would I be losing by going for this approach that a NAS would offer me?

 

[GregN]

What would I be losing by going for this approach that a NAS would offer me?

Good question.

You'd lose the 10Gbs bandwidth to your Mac if you went strictly network with a NAS. It does look like it is Direct Attach, so everything would have to go through the mini to get to the Promise box, that seems to limit flexibility.

But Thunderbolt will daisy chain ( second port? ) Can you do Mac to Mac with Thunderbolt?

One thing you will lose, is some weight from your wallet, the promise boxes are more expensive than a comparable NAS.

Need to do more research, I'm not really on top of this.

 

[philby]

Now that OS X 10.7 (Lion) Server has become really affordable, a Mini with an attached dual-drive RAID setup (e.g. a FW800 WesternDigital MyBook Studio II) would certainly work very well as a really fast and capable file server solution. No need for any Linux NAS setup worries, and no need to wait for Thunderbolt drives, IMHO.

 

[joepimentel]

Now that OS X 10.7 (Lion) Server has become really affordable, a Mini with an attached dual-drive RAID setup (e.g. a FW800 WesternDigital MyBook Studio II) would certainly work very well as a really fast and capable file server solution. No need for any Linux NAS setup worries, and no need to wait for Thunderbolt drives, IMHO.

Hmm, that's something to think about. I just considered the notion of Thunderbolt only because from what I've read FW800 can only push about 780Mb/s, and therefore I was thinking that shared FW800 drives through a Mac Mini won't max out the Gigabit links between the Mac Mini and other (wired) devices on my network.

But if the price is right, maybe FW800 is still a viable solution. Thanks for that suggestion.

 

[claykin]

Personally, I prefer a solution that can read disk SMART data. eSata is an example.

USB/FW cannot reliably read it.

Not sure about TB. Haven't researched it much since the PC camp isn't adopting it just yet..

 

[teknojnky]

Keep in mind that, TB drives are simply regular sata drives with a TB bridge/converter chip etc.

Much like how usb/firewire drives are regular sata (or ide) drives with a usb/firewire bridge chip.

Thunderbolt won't make any drive faster than it would be as a plain sata drive.

 

[joepimentel]

Keep in mind that, TB drives are simply regular sata drives with a TB bridge/converter chip etc.

Much like how usb/firewire drives are regular sata (or ide) drives with a usb/firewire bridge chip.

Thunderbolt won't make any drive faster than it would be as a plain sata drive.

Great point. This is why I was thinking that Thunderbolt external drives would work best in this setup. If I were to use USB2 or even FW800 external drives, the interface would be the bottleneck. If I were to share Thunderbolt drives over a Mac Mini then the bottleneck would be Gigabit port on the Mini, which I think would hold true for a NAS as well. Please correct me if I'm wrong. This is of course assuming that the drives internal to the Thunderbolt units are moderately fast SATA II drives.

Which brings me back to my original question: For a home user that doesn't need the management software of a NAS what can a good-quality 2 or 4 bay NAS offer me that my Mac Mini + Thunderbolt solution can't, especially since it seems like a good-quality NAS with enough CPU, RAM , etc. to transmit at 1Gb/s speeds is about the price of a Mac Mini? It even seems like the extras that most NAS units offer (mail server, web server, ftp server, media streaming) can all be accomplished on a Mac Mini, and much more.

A part of me wants to get a NAS, especially since they're a many solutions available now unlike Thunderbolt, but a part of me can't see why I couldn't accomplish this with a Mac Mini solution... which of course offers the convenience of a full computer. The more I think about it it seems that buying a good quality 2 or 4 bay NAS is simply buying a moderately expensive piece of hardware with a very limited purpose, and is not a good value when compared to the Mac Mini solution that I'm also entertaining.

Thanks to everyone who has replied so far.

 

[GregN]

Just an Aside:

From:

A simple guide to Thunderbolt connection technology

Does Thunderbolt support Target Disk Mode and Migration Assistant?

On the new MacBook Pro models, you can use Target Disk Mode over a computer-to-computer Thunderbolt connection. We assume this will be the case with future Thunderbolt-equipped Macs, as well.

However, Mac OS X's Migration Assistant software doesn't currently support Thunderbolt connections.


It appears as though a rough ( and ugly? ) 10Gb file sharing network could be daisy chained together, lort of like a fibre channel loop config. Anyone have a more definitive answer?

Which brings me back to my original question: For a home user that doesn't need the management software of a NAS what can a good-quality 2 or 4 bay NAS offer me that my Mac Mini + Thunderbolt solution can't, especially since it seems like a good-quality NAS with enough CPU, RAM , etc. to transmit at 1Gb/s speeds is about the price of a Mac Mini? It even seems like the extras that most NAS units offer (mail server, web server, ftp server, media streaming) can all be accomplished on a Mac Mini, and much more.

If the question is, does treating a mini + thunderbolt storage as a logical NAS have any advantages over a real NAS, the only thing I can think of is Cost and maybe support. If you are dedicating the mini to serving storage, it is liable to offer better performance and added flexibility (as you point out, it is a fully fleshed machine). You are just paying for two boxes instead of one box that is purpose driven and supported as such.

Given that, I think the daisy changing and flexibility of Thunderbolt make this a cool idea.

 

[teknojnky]

I'd expect you'd pay a lot more for the priviledge of a mac mini + TB drives than you would for a modern nas.

If you have not already seen it yet, the (currently) only TB drive bays available;

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-thunderbolt-review

 

[Generic George]

Great point. This is why I was thinking that Thunderbolt external drives would work best in this setup. If I were to use USB2 or even FW800 external drives, the interface would be the bottleneck. If I were to share Thunderbolt drives over a Mac Mini then the bottleneck would be Gigabit port on the Mini, which I think would hold true for a NAS as well. Please correct me if I'm wrong. This is of course assuming that the drives internal to the Thunderbolt units are moderately fast SATA II drives.

This is correct, the gigabit ethernet, which don't forget is bit not byte, so it's got a theoretical max of 125mb/sec and you often aren't going to see even that. So the Ethernet is the limit and a single HD, never mind an SSD, can pretty much saturate that these days.

To be perfectly frank, I don't think Thunderbolt is really relevant for what you seem to want it for. FW 800 is pretty much as fast as is going to make a difference for anything you are accessing over a network, even if you assume that it maxes out at 90mb/s. An additional 10 or 20 mb/s simply isn't going to change anything that much.

Enormous disk throughput is not really that useful for most home applications. Video editing is the only thing that most home users do that it is likely to make any real difference with.

Which brings me back to my original question: For a home user that doesn't need the management software of a NAS what can a good-quality 2 or 4 bay NAS offer me that my Mac Mini + Thunderbolt solution can't, especially since it seems like a good-quality NAS with enough CPU, RAM , etc. to transmit at 1Gb/s speeds is about the price of a Mac Mini? It even seems like the extras that most NAS units offer (mail server, web server, ftp server, media streaming) can all be accomplished on a Mac Mini, and much more.

A part of me wants to get a NAS, especially since they're a many solutions available now unlike Thunderbolt, but a part of me can't see why I couldn't accomplish this with a Mac Mini solution... which of course offers the convenience of a full computer. The more I think about it it seems that buying a good quality 2 or 4 bay NAS is simply buying a moderately expensive piece of hardware with a very limited purpose, and is not a good value when compared to the Mac Mini solution that I'm also entertaining.

I guess the point I am unclear on, is do you want to use the mac mini as a primary device or as a storage/utility device?

For example, you reference your movie collection in the original post, but does that mean you want to play the movies back through the Mac Mini or that you are going to use something else, like a PS3 as your media player and it will just be pulling files off of the mini.

If you want to use the mini as a device for doing stuff with, then it would make sense to get it.

If you just want it for storage and utility functions, then you are probably better off with a NAS. Lion Server does add some value to the Mac Mini solution, but unless you really need to run a network, it probably isn't a real improvement over what the NAS can offer.

You are going to pay significantly more for the mac mini solution, in all probability. Since the mini will cost you as much as the NAS or more and then you still need to get the external storage unit (Firewire or Thunderbolt or whatever).

A NAS is yes going to be less flexible, but they are designed to do what they do well and more simply than any computer even a Mac can. Plus there isn't "mission creep".

For example, if you wanted to play WoW and your wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend/friend/cat/dog/goldfish/in-law/etc... wanted to watch a video, the demands of WoW might make the other functions you want from it unusable. Where if you have a dedicated unit doing nothing other than serving files, it won't be burdened by other demands on it.

Just an Aside:

It appears as though a rough ( and ugly? ) 10Gb file sharing network could be daisy chained together, lort of like a fibre channel loop config. Anyone have a more definitive answer?
.

I have seen it speculated that thunderbolt may be able to be used for what you describe, once website speculated that for example it could serve very well for linking machines for distributed processing. However, I have seen nothing to the effect that it can actually be used this way currently.

What Thunderbolt really does is bring PCIe lanes out of the computer. So that devices that would have otherwise had to be installed inside a computer could now be made external. For example, Sony has an upcoming ultraportable that uses thunderbolt to access a docking station that in addition to other ports includes a dedicated graphics card.

Of course it does also partially defeat the purpose of a having a small computer or laptop, if you have to hook it up to this big box to do stuff with it.

In the end, I think we are really at least a year off from thunderbolt having any sort of a device ecosystem for it and a lot can change in computers in a year.

 

[GregN]

CNet Spume

CNet has a quick frothy piece on Thunderbolt vs. USB3, mentioning the Pegasus R6 and transfer speeds.

 

[GregN]

Full CNet (read short) review of Promise Pegasus R6

Their Conclusion:

We were really impressed by the Pegasus R6's unprecedentedly fast performance, but were let down by its price and especially its lack of support for other peripheral interfaces. While you wouldn't buy the expensive Pegasus R6 to use exclusively with an older Mac or a Windows system, the fact that you can't connect it to those systems at all without an adapter is an annoyance. That's a minor complaint considering the Pegasus R6's performance, though. For Thunderbolt Mac owners with the capacity and storage-speed requirements to justify such a large expense, this drive is a worthwhile investment.

Read more: http://reviews.cnet.com/external-ha...2tb/4505-3190_7-34855283-2.html#ixzz1Uui5WLmw


It does appear to cook with Gas....

 

[kappapilla]

Thanks

I am newbie....so, if following are my needs
- replacing an old computer (mostly use for iMovie, photo editing, web page creation)
- safe backup ( new need .. may be RAID kind of config)
- integration with TV, iPad and automatic backup
- extend memory as i need
now would Mac mini with thunderbolting a 500GB drive suit my needs. Next year if i get a superspeed harddrive, can i daisy chain it-basically expanding my backup? I am assuming here that Mac mini server would perform soft RAID config and other mail, ftp and other server activities...

am I thinking in the right direction?

 

[teknojnky]

I am assuming here that Mac mini server would perform soft RAID config...

am I thinking in the right direction?

not really.

daisy-chaining external drives is not RAID and provides no protection from drive failures. ie if a drive failed, any data on that particular drive is gone unless backed up to a different, still working, drive.

 

[stevech]

Since Firewire(tm) is essentially gone, overwhelmed by USB2, USB3, eSATA, would it not be the same prognosis for Thunderbolt?

 

[andrewj]

speed of Synology v. Mac Mini server

I was hoping to revisit this topic. On my end, I'm primarily interested in making >1 TB of imaging files available over the network.

My main question is speed (and assuming money is not an issue): how would the speed of accessing files on a Mac Mini server, with drives attached by Thunderbolt, be compared to say the Synology 1512+?