Question for the Apple buffs

[StescoG66]

Have i pod touch and soon to be i pad for the mrs. 2 things. All my photos and music are stored on a NAS drive at home which I access wirelessly with my PC. Is there a way to get both the Apples to read and use the data from the NAS drive rather than store loads of files on each one?

Also - can my i Tunes be backed up on my NAS drive and accessed easily by both the i pod and i pad so I don't need to duplicate playlists etc.

Cheers

S

[Icheb]

I'm no Apple buff but I'll attempt to answer your question and then be prepared to be corrected by those in the know later on

Most NAS drives come with the ability to act as iTunes servers (AFAIK). I think you just need to make sure that you point iTunes to the place where the music is stored. This might mean transferring the music to a new folder on the NAS drive other wise you'll probably need to keep your PC switched on all the time so that the iPad and iPod can access the relevant libraries.

There is also the 'Home Share' option as well, if your NAS setup isn't capable of running an iTunes server.

Might be worth popping along to the Apple forums though - if you get no further responses here.

God luck and let us know how you get on. The wife was given an iPad from work a month or so ago and given the amount of wireless devices now in the house, I'm seriously considering a NAS drive, so any feedback from your experience would be greatly appreciated this end as well

[Icheb]

.

[StescoG66]

^^^ ooopppsss! Sorry this dropped off my radar over the hols. What you saidiworked a treat - for the iPad. However the Pod is IOS4 against the 5 of the pad so doesn't work for that alas. Quite easy to do actually and - just as you say - point all iTunes activity to the NAS where the file is stored and bingo. Jobs a good un.

A belated thank you for your advice

[Icheb]

Apologies for my flippant remarks.

Totally unnecessary on my part - but apparently, I'm quite good at that these days.

Glad you got it sorted

Oh, and any feedback regarding NAS drives would be most welcome, today or in six months, I'm easy.

[StescoG66]

Fear not kind sir - it was taken in the flippant manner it was delivered and no offence taken ok

It was impolite of me not to respond after you ahd taken the trouble to reply so for that I apologise.

Now. NAS drives. I have a Seagate Black Armour 2 x 2TB which has been steady as a rock. In fact saved my bacon more than once or twice as I have had a couple of computer crashes since buying it so the backups were worth their weight in gold. My neighbour has a Netgear 2 x 1TB which he too swears by so you pays your money . . . . .

Both of us used e-buyer to purchase as at the time they seemed to have some of the best deals around. Link to both units are below. I'm no expert but I just went by a known brand and the best spec I could find for the money . . . . .

Seagate black armour

Netgear

[100th_Idiot]

I can also recommend QNAP TS-219 with 2 x 2TB drives. Got mine from scan.co.uk.

[Icheb]

Cheers fellas

I was looking at the Netgear models about 12 months ago. I remember being initially drawn too them because they were being sold via Dabs et al, with a voucher to claim a free HDD but it was only a 500Gb model and not a well known brand. I think there were also some Firmware issues being reported.

The seagate looks a bit OTT for my needs but when you factor in the cost of the Drives that are included it appears to be a good price.

Now then, the QNAP really got my attention. The reviews look great and although you have to buy the drives (at least I can get what I want, instead of being sold these silly eco drives), the functionality looks far better then anything else in the home market price range.

Cheers for the feedback. Much appreciated. Looks like I might be getting an early birthday present

[GhostyDog]

Seagate's support is appalling for the BlackArmour NAS, basically they can't support it, I have first hand experience of this having believed the hype in the advertising and installed one in a small mac artwork studio.

It should have fit their requirements given it has Directory integrated authentication good for a split platform business i.e. windows/OS X but it didn't work, folders dissapeared and reappeared, the implementation of SAMBA was incompatible with OS X meaning that all shares were read only and in the end I just opened it all up securitywise to get the thing working. Even then there were weird permission issues with files saved not inheriting their parent folder permission but retaining the local users permissions...

By this point I was outside the initial returns period and all that seagate could offer was a swapout, but no resolution, I knew the problem was software based not hardware based so just left it as it was.

Stick with QNap, Netgear ReadyNas and Synology Kit, Seagate don't (or didn't up til a year ago) have the experience to support products in this marketplace.