Reliable NAS for movie storage/streaming & Time Machine backups?

[polskajason]

Hi,

We currently use a WD My Book Live Duo 4TB drive (bought and started using around March 2012) that's partitioned (RAID?) so that we use 2TB and the other 2TB drive provides redundancy.

We use the drive for both Time Machine backups of our 2 MacBooks, and also a storage/streaming server for media files (movies mostly). We also throw large files that we want to get off our computer but don't want to discard, but also don't want to just have buried in the Time Machine backup in case of total computer failure.

The problem is that the drive has problems all the time. I've had to restore and redo the backups 3 times already, and now I'm seeing more problems with backing up in Time Machine which means I'll probably have to restart the entire 24 hour process again. Aarrrgghh!

Are we approaching this wrong? Is the device wrong? Are we asking too much expecting it to function as a Time Machine backup *and* a network drive?

We probably have about 400 GB of files (photos and movies), plus Time Machine is probably using half a TB for the two machines it's backing up for. So we're not even close to hitting the 2TB limit.

Is a cloud solution better? I hate the idea of having spent $300 for something that might fail exactly the day before we needed it to have worked.

 

[garak0410]

Hi,

We currently use a WD My Book Live Duo 4TB drive (bought and started using around March 2012) that's partitioned (RAID?) so that we use 2TB and the other 2TB drive provides redundancy.

We use the drive for both Time Machine backups of our 2 MacBooks, and also a storage/streaming server for media files (movies mostly). We also throw large files that we want to get off our computer but don't want to discard, but also don't want to just have buried in the Time Machine backup in case of total computer failure.

The problem is that the drive has problems all the time. I've had to restore and redo the backups 3 times already, and now I'm seeing more problems with backing up in Time Machine which means I'll probably have to restart the entire 24 hour process again. Aarrrgghh!

Are we approaching this wrong? Is the device wrong? Are we asking too much expecting it to function as a Time Machine backup *and* a network drive?

We probably have about 400 GB of files (photos and movies), plus Time Machine is probably using half a TB for the two machines it's backing up for. So we're not even close to hitting the 2TB limit.

Is a cloud solution better? I hate the idea of having spent $300 for something that might fail exactly the day before we needed it to have worked.

I have this drive and the only problem I had is that when it close to being full, it stopped responding and I had to power off and back on. Otherwise, it has been pretty good. But it's been less than 30 day's, so hard to say for sure if it is a keeper or not.