NAS for Mac

jonsynnott

Hi,

I am looking to find a NAS (Network Accesible Server) for a MAC. i have the Netgear SC101 that works great with my Windows Labtopm but i need to find a similar system that will work for a MAC.
Does anyone know if the SC101 can work with MAC, and if not have you any recommendations on what products are available to work with MAC.

Thanks in advance

Jon

ZENER

I'm pretty sure that most NAS devices use a linux os with SAMBA to share the hard drive on a network. So basically any OS that can see Windows shares will see the NAS unit (Network Accessible STORAGE) .

The unit you've linked to is different, it uses the SAN protocol or Storage Area Network which according to the support site is not compatible with Mac OS X.

My advice is to buy a NAS enclosure and supply your own drives which can probably be sourced cheaper elsewhere. This will give you better compatibility with Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and allows the device to stand alone without the need for another computer to be turned all the time.

This Linksys Unit lets you plug in USB hard drive enclosures and share them on the network. Other devices can take an internal IDE drive like this D-Link unit.

There are plenty of others available if you shop around.

Alternatively you can use an old low spec machine with something like SME server or other free NAS software to do the same thing basically they're just linux boxes running SAMBA. FreeNAS is another such option.

ZEN

rymus

ZENER wrote:

My advice is to buy a NAS enclosure and supply your own drives which can probably be sourced cheaper elsewhere. This will give you better compatibility with Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and allows the device to stand alone without the need for another computer to be turned all the time.

I'd agree with that... Get a good unit, 3 or 4 hard drives and setup RAID 5 on your network attached storage unit. It wont be cheap but it should be wonderfully reliable and if you use gigabit ethernet, quite fast.

jonsynnott

Cheers for the info guys. That was my fear.
I'll look into the options mentioned and see what i can come up with.

thanks again

Jon

Zimmerframe

I got an enclosure, from Maplin about a week ago, nice looking aluminium fanless one. Think it was around €57, popped in an old 250gb hdd, and it works fine with my macbook, albeit a bit slow the transfer over network, also works over usb2.
It also has the brightest blue led, I've ever seen, lights up the whole room at night.

parsi

I have a Lacie Ethernet Disk Mini (v2) which works fine with my Mac and PCs. Worth a look and reasonable enough on the lacie site.

juice79

Out of stock at the moment but Iomega recently released some 'home network' drives.

http://www.iomega-europe.com/item?SID=f7f04be2aa17b863c9a320394288ccd8801:4725&sku=204133457