Mac NAS PS3 Help

[PadRock]

Hello all

My external hard drive has died (after a little fall!) and I've been thinking about getting a NAS drive with the intention of eventually having all my music stored in an Apple Lossless format and wirelessly streaming it to my amp via a PS3 (I know the PS3 doesn't support lossless yet, but figure that has to come soon ... doesn't it?!?). Also watch a lot of downloaded video content this way.

Without going overboard on cost ... what can anyone recommend? The Western Digital My Book World Edition seems decent value at £156 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-World-Network-Storage/dp/B001RNNTVQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1241187764&sr=8-1), but what advantage would something like the Buffalo Terastation have over that? Given the price difference (£400ish), I would expect it to be a lot!

I've been struggling to get my head round all the various options so any help / guidance with this would be very welcome!!

 

[Anonymous]

I had a WD MyBook drive and be warned.....data transfer rates are very very slow. Got fed up and stripped it down and fitted the drive inside my pc. It works OK but transfer speeds suck.

 

[Anonymous]

PadRock:Hello all

ÿMy external hard drive has died (after a little fall!) and I've been thinking about getting a NAS drive with the intention of eventually having all my music stored in an Apple Lossless format and wirelessly streaming it to my amp via a PS3 (I know the PS3 doesn't support lossless yet, but figure that has to come soon ... doesn't it?!?).ÿ Also watch a lot of downloaded video content this way.

Without going overboard on cost ... what can anyone recommend?ÿ The Western Digital My Book World Edition seems decent value at £156 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-World-Network-Storage/dp/B001RNNTVQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1241187764&sr=8-1), but what advantage would something like the Buffalo Terastation have over that?ÿ Given the price difference (£400ish), I would expect it to be a lot!

ÿI've been struggling to get my head round all the various options so any help / guidance with this would be very welcome!!

I've just exchanged my PS3 for a mac. Had been intending to do exactly what you describe, but found the sound quality from the PS3 wasn't that great even, surprisingly enough, when using an external DAC. You're better off with the mac>AE>DAC>amp solution.

 

[Anonymous]

I have the WD mybook 1TB NAS for 2 years. Still working great. The unit has very slow transfer rates, due to very small amount of RAM on it and some needless processes running on the unit by default. I hacked it to improve the transfer rates, but not more than 10%. A nice thing about it is it runs linux so you can install mt-daapd and stream to itunes on demand without transfering the files. But this involves hacking the thing and the risk of bricking it. The best thing about the WD is it's reliability which I value most in storage solutions.The worst from a hi-fi standpoind is the noise the fans make.

After rescuing over 300GB of music from a failed internal drive I don't use internal drives for storage any more, they are unreliable because of heating issues. Currently my storage solution is an old pc with 2X1TB WD Mybooks connected by USB.

If using an older pc with USB drives is not an option for you I'd recommend the WD Mybook NAS, but only if you use it for music, photos and backups, not for video. The transfer rates make it unusable for video.

 

[Anonymous]

In practical terms how does a slow Data Transfer Rate affect playing music on a NAS?

When selecting a different track would a slow DTR mean the time taken to moved between tracks is lengthened? Or is there more to it than this?

Keep it simple!

 

[Anonymous]

Ok

"In practical terms how does a slow Data Transfer Rate affect playing music on a NAS?"

The shortest answer is: it doesn't affect playing music, unless you are transfering the music files to you computer before playing.

The WD can cope with enough bandwidth for uninterrupted play of any
audio compression format. And this is probably the slowest NAS out
there. Jumping from track to track won't be affected. Maybe if you have a lot of files and folders in one place (hundreds of files and folders) there will be some noticeable delay to get the folder listing, but nothing to be worried about.

Transfering your riped mateial to the NAS will be affected (it will be slow).