[hawiken]

Can anyone recommend a Mac-friendly NAS box? We're currently using a Buffalo Tera Station, and it's not living up to my expectations in the way that it places restrictions on file transfers from my MacBook Pro. Also- Buffalo's tech support tells me that Macs aren't 'officially supported'. Works fine with the PC's, though...
Thanks,
Ken

[mduell]

What sort of restrictions does the Tera Station place on transfers from the MBP? I've never been a big fan of Buffalo's products.

All three of these mention OS X support specifically:
Newegg.com - OKGEAR LAN-BK Networking Enclosure - Retail
Newegg.com - Galaxy METAL GEAR 3507LR-Black External Enclosure w/Display & Dual Speed Blue LED Fan - Retail
Newegg.com - BYTECC BT380(SILVER) NAS External Enclosure - Retail

[kamina]

The Terastation should work fine, it's just that AFP is such an old version that it restricts file names ect. This is actually the case with every NAS I've seen till now, AFP support is non-existant. Probably an Apple Extreme base station with an external disk would the the only working solution. Unfortunately the Apple Extreme is very slow compared to most NAS devices.

So my recomendation would be to use samba to connect to the Terastation. In other words instead of just connecting using the ip-address connect using smb://ip-address.

It could be that AFP is upgraded in the newer Terastation versions (atleast perfomance is over double faster) but they are not available retail yet and I have not seen any reviews.

[hawiken]

Aloha, All- thanks for replying.
Re: Mac restrictions- the Tera Station limits Mac file names to 32 characters, which is actually not such a big deal. The biggest problem that I'm encountering is that it won't accept file names that include the characters ? [ ] / \ = + < > ; : " , * which is turning out to be a pain- I'm trying to move about 1 gig worth of old company files to it, and some of those file names contain one or more of those forbidden characters.
So, I can't just drag and drop the folder containing all of those files onto the TS, because importation stops when the TS encounters one of the forbidden characters. Even using smb, I encounter the same problem.
Therefore, my approach now is to drag and drop the folder onto the Windows XP VM that I've set up on my MacBook Pro with Parallels, and export the files from there to the TS, but even there, I'm encountering some problems- there are certain Word docs that the XP VM isn't able to read for some reason- I get an error message saying, "Cannot copy file: Cannot read from the source file or disk"; (mostly these files seem to be .docs that have been emailed to me from our attorney), but that's a question for another forum...
And I probably should have been a little clearer in my original post- I'm in need of an NAS that's dual platform friendly- XP and Mac- we have 3 PC's and 2 Macs- and I've been so far unsuccessful in finding a solution. I'm going to take a look at the WD MyBook Pro- on any proposed solutions, it would be great if I could read the operating manual before buying...
I did turn the folder containing all of the old file into a disk image, and I could move that onto the TS, but the PC's on the network were unable to open it.
Of course, once I DO get all of the old files moved, I'll know what to avoid in naming files in the future.
Thanks, again, Ken

[kamina]

Yes, I understood. The problem is that you connected to the Terastation using AFP. AFP is Apples own file sharing protocol, and these day's it's pretty good. The old versions where however pretty limited in what characters they supported.

Now here is the catch:

-Buffalo is one of the only companies who have AFP in their NAS units (only it's so old it's useless)
-Mac's can use other protocols too, you are not restricted to using AFP

So as I mentioned above, you have to connect using a different protocol, Samba. You won't get any better then that without:

- Getting an Airport Extreme and connected a disk to it's USB port (but speeds will be about 1/3 of what you get with the Terastation)
- Getting an XServe and using it for filesharing
- Building a fileserver yourself and running Linux with AFP on that

Apple is supported with the Terastation, just not AFP. What they mean by Apple not being supported is that their support doesn't understand anything about Apple computers

[hawiken]

Thanks again for the help!
Actually, I have been connecting through Samba. I still encounter the same restriction(s)/problem(s).
It appears that these are some of the normal problems encountered in a mixed platform environment?
Don't even get me started on trying to print to a Savin multi-function office machine...
Ken

[kamina]

Oh, if you are using Samba it has to be something else. I don't have a Terastation, but I used to have a Linkstation and didn't have charecter problems with it. The problems you describe are exactly what I faced when connecting using AFP which is the default OSX uses. One idea is that you might have to change the charset it defaults to (you can do it from the Terastation management page).

Other then that, I would ask at the forums here Main Page - Terastation

Or look in the wiki for an awnser. I believe it's surely a solvable problem.

[Tomchu]

Err ... screw Samba.

Has everyone forgotten about NFS?

[hawiken]

NFS? Could you explain?
Thanks,
Ken

[hawiken]

Kamina- thanks! I'll check the forum pages at TS.
Ken

[Tomchu]

My opinion is that Samba should be used only when either the client or the server are a Windows machine. For anything between *nix hosts, NFS is the way to go (or AFP if they're both Macs).

Build a server with plenty of RAM and storage space, put the disks in RAID 1, slap FreeBSD on it, and turn it into a NAS-over-NFS box. It'll be 100% configurable and upgradeable. And probably cheaper too.

[ginoledesma]

There are some user-reviews/reports in XLR8YourMac's Drive Compatibility Database. I have the D-Link DNS-323, a 2-bay SATA network storage enclosure which I use with 2 Maxtor 500GB SATA-II drives in RAID-1. It works pretty well but is strictly limited to Samba (Windows) file sharing. I've noticed it has the 2GB file limit, unfortunately. For its price, I'm happy with it and how I use it with. It's 10/100/1000Mbps port also allows me to get a little bit more speed when I decide to get a Gigabit router or 802.11n w/ Gigabit ethernet ports.

If you really want Mac-friendly NAS solutions, get something that has AFP support at the very least. The ReadyNAS products are getting very good reports on their performance and feature set.

[hawiken]

Thanks to you all- ginoledesma-I must be reading the same things that you are- ReadyNAS is the name that I keep coming up with as well.
Sorry for the late response- I was away from the computer all weekend.
Eventually, I'll let you all know what we did.
Take care,
Ken

[ruperts]

I use the DNS-323 with the latest Firmware and there is not 2GB limit. It works fine with Macs but only SMB protocoll to connect to the drive. It has redundancy built in if you use 2 drives in RAID 1 mode... the only problem i found is reconnecting after the Mac client wakes from a prolonged sleep.. but that is probably because I set the drive to idle after 30 minutes.... the iTunes server works nicely too... If you need well integrated AFP support than maybe you should check out the LaCie - Ethernet Disk mini - The easy-to-use network hard drive

greetings
rupert

[SpinCycle]

I connect to a drive over on a PC via Samba I believe, and sending files is WAY faster than recieving them.. Any Idea on how to speed it up?

[indigoimac]

Here's what I would do...

Get a mac w/ firewire and either 10/100 or gigabit ethernet, then get an external firewire HD and format it for mac, the macs will access it via AFS and then install SharePoints SharePoints 3.5.4 - MacUpdate so that you can share said external drive via samba w/ the PCs, I used this setup w/o any problems for quite a while until I got rid of my PC. It's by far the simplest.

[hawiken]

Aloha, Indigo,
So, I'd reformat the Tera Station, install OS 10.x on the Tera Station, and then install SharePoints on the Tera Station? Or, would I have to do that on a different external drive? On which machine to I install SharePoints?
Thanks,
Ken

[indigoimac]

Originally Posted by hawiken 

Aloha, Indigo,
So, I'd reformat the Tera Station, install OS 10.x on the Tera Station, and then install SharePoints on the Tera Station? Or, would I have to do that on a different external drive? On which machine to I install SharePoints?
Thanks,
Ken

Yikes, way off...

Ok, Sharepoints you install on a computer running osx to allow Samba to share the external drive, I'm sure there's some way to do it via command prompt but SharePoints is easier. The external drive can be any external harddrive, if the terrastation has firewire you can just use it as a local drive on the machine that u install sharepoints on, or for the sake of simplicity just get an external firewire drive.

You plug he mac w/ sharepoints into ur network, the macs will see the external drive regardless of SharePoints because they'll use rendezvous and afs, the PCs however are dependent on Samba and SharePoints, so in the sharing pane of system prefs make sure both file sharing and windows sharing are enabled.

To access the drive from Windows you'll need to, from My Computer, go tools, map network drive, you can either browse for it or type the IP in of the mac, you'll need to click on something to the effect of login w/ different username/pass, this is what u set up in sharepoints.

For the macs, just either go to Network and connect to the mac and then select the name of the external drive, or go to "go" connect to server.

I know this is sorta confusing, hopefully this sorts some of it out, it took me a while to figure this whole scheme out, but I assure you once you get it up it's rock-solid and really one of the best ways to do it. If you have any q's PM or catch me on AIM.