Looking for the Best Network Drive that is compatible with BOTH Infuse and MacOS Finder (SMB?)
For years I’ve used an Airport Extreme with an external HD as a media server. Partitioned into two volumes, it works great as both my Time Capsule backup drive, and as a Shared Folder that I can easily read/write to from within MacOS Finder (via SMB) and which Infuse apps (ATV, iOS and MacOS) can also index.
The Airport is getting old. I need to get something new. So far, everything I’ve looked at fails compatibility tests either with MacOS Finder or with Infuse. Any suggestions are welcome (but only those based on actual experience with both MacOS Finder read/write and Infuse — all the other work-arounds won’t accomplish what I’m wanting to do.)
I was using a drobo with a MacMini and NFS for infuse. Sadly the drobo is no more and I am about to set up a synology NAS, probably vis smb. I have heard good reports and the previous replies give me confidence m
Add my voice to the chorus recommending an NAS. (I use Synology)
Let me take a moment to note that you’ll likely want to populate the NAS with NAS specific hard drives — which are designed for far longer uptime and long-durations of nearly constant file read-write activity — and should give better results than standard computer hard drives and those optimized for speedy access (with higher spindle speeds). Dedicated NAS drives come with longer standard guarantees as well, say 3-5 years instead of 1 or 2.
I’ve long use Seagate IronWolf NAS drives … WD Red drives are, I believe, the Western Digital equivalent. Sometimes actual server-quality hard drives sell inexpensively enough to make their purchase worthwhile. They have the highest ratings for uptime (and mean time between failures) and therefore also the longest warranties.
Another great benefit of a multi-bay NAS devices is the ability to stripe your content across all the disks in the array, so that if one of them ever fails, all your content remains accessible and you only need to replace the failed drive with a new one to regain the disk-failure tolerance necessary to protect against possibly losing another drive. Critical data can be set up with multi-disc fault tolerance, but drives fail so infrequently I doubt it would be worth it in almost all normal use cases.
Another recommendation is to start with bigger drives than you need. I thought 6TB for a total of 24 in a 4 bay NAS would be enough for me but as time goes on and I get more movies that space filled up and I had to get a new system.
I agree with everyone here recommending a NAS, both for ease of use (Infuse + MacOS finder) and data redundancy.
Although I must point out a caveat: I’d recommend not using the NAS as a networked drive in MacOS finder to transfer large video files. In my experience, those files had a tendency to deteriorate in transfer (in playback chunks of the file would be skipped as if missing). Never had this issue when uploading large video files through the web UI (I use a synology nas).
Might not be normal behaviour though, someone with more technical experience can maybe shed some lights on this and if it is to be expected.
I bought four 10TB drives for my 4-bay NAS and for at least the last six months I’ve been stuck needing to offset all new arrivals by offloading other content to offline backups. And I consider myself somewhat judicious in my acquisitions — I only add content I specifically want to watch (though I admittedly want to watch far more content than I’ll ever likely have time to watch).
And this is also after I converted 99.995% of my titles to the far more efficient x265/hevc codec (from h264 and numerous other codecs stunningly older and less efficient than that); which freed up significant amounts of space; even accounting for my having concurrently taken the opportunity to significantly upgrade the quality of my pre-existing content library in almost every instance as well (both in resolution — now a minimum resolution of 1080p, with an ever growing collection of 4K in HDR/DV).
Definitely price out your available storage options on a $ (or whatever your local currency unit is) per TB basis, and invest in a pair (to start) of the largest drives you can afford that aren’t outrageously overpriced per TB compared to the lesser-spaced options in the same line.
I also have same problem. Atm, im using 4 x 8TB Samsung qvo 870 ssd connected on sabrent powered usb hub with airport extreme. I have a question. Whats your test transfer speed between apple tv/mac in and can i use file system apfs in NAS synology ?
