Data Center Advisors

After moving to Japan I’ve been a big fan of Apple TV and catching up on US TV shows in HD on the thing.  I suppose that I’m still in the generation that likes to own my media and not hunt the Internet for free media.  Well as a result of this while the volume of my personal files has not grow significantly, the amount of capacity used, especially for HD quality episodes, has ballooned.  Basically I just had to relocate my TV shows into another iTunes library and a separate external Firewire attached HDD.  So I’ve been poking around on how people are managing their huge iTunes libraries, and mind you mine is not that big by comparison to say Will Friedwald, but there is not a uniform manner to do this.  Also there is not really a product from Apple or an Apple partner to do this.  Frankly, I think that Apple will soon be stumbling upon a problem of how to manage large media libraries in the home.  I know that Microsoft and others have tried to make Windows Media Center a smash hit and it has little adoption to speak of.  My own personal guess for this is that not enough people are experiencing the problem of large digital media libraries so well they did not need a product.  Well I’m at a point that I do and being the Storage Muse I’m going to put down some requirements and see what people think.

• Mirrored at the HW level with RAID-1
• Resident in iTunes as managed resource
• Definable sync policies between computers and various devices from a central iTunes
• The iTunes service has all the blasted metadata for what has been purchased, it should allow someone to restore from that metadata in the event of a serious problem or data loss event, in fact I would pay for this

I’m sure that there are more requirements, but I have a suggestion for Apple, uplift Time Capsule to be a media edition version or do something with AppleTV.  I personally don’t have time to spend cooking up a solution and would rather just buy something.  So if there are any recommendations or amendments to my rather short requirements list above please drop me a line.  Also if there is a recommendation for what to do let me know that as well.

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I use a Drobo (www.drobo.com) attached to my Airport Extreme to share music on the network. I have 4x1TB Hitachi Deskstar drives in a RAID 5 config. The Drobo is great because you can mix and match different drive sizes and upgrade to different disks at any time.

I use two primary music systems – iTunes and Sonos. My primary iTunes library is stored on the Drobo and accessed from my MacBook via a mount point. I use iTunes to support my iPhone and Apple TV music and movie needs, but for general listening in the house and yard I use my Sonos whole house music system. It reads the same shared library, bypassing iTunes.

I have another shared drive on the Drobo that I use as a backup drive for the MacBooks and my work files and Outlook PSTs.

I gave up on Time Machine. Nice idea but doesn’t support network drives unless you have a Time Capsule, and there is no RAID.

Also agree with you that iTunes media management interface doesn’t work well for large libraries (I have 300GB of music, movies, podcasts and TV shows growing fast).

Multi-TB homes have been a reality for a while (we have 5 PCs/Macs in our house with over 2TB of total internal storage). Given that, multi-TB home networked storage systems are becoming a reality. Maybe there needs to be a version of the Hitachi Storage Command Suite for home use?

Yes Nick, that’s what I’m looking for is something like the storage command suite for home use and all of the trimmings for that. Which means that your grandmother had better be able to use it. It cannot be for expert storage administrators and needs to also implement capacity savings features such as deduplication, compression, SiS and the like. Well here’s to pipe dreams. I’d just be happy if Apple would produce something either for pay or as a feature in iTunes to report on what I have and help me figure out how to best use the spare capacity I have lying around.

[...] Today looked at several consumer NAS products in this article.  In my recent post on iTunes woes I longed for a storage management application to manage my balooning iTunes digital media library. [...]

[...] version of the file, and this is really what kicked off my thinking process.  If I could own an iTunes directed digital copy on my computer with numerous backup copies on various hard drives, and a HD copy on [...]

[...] fact, in the past I have blogged about the results of content savings resulting in  me lusting for easy to use storage resource management and disaster tools for the [...]

[...] version of the file, and this is really what kicked off my thinking process.  If I could own an iTunes directed digital copy on my computer with numerous backup copies on various hard drives, and a HD copy on [...]

[...] version of the file, and this is really what kicked off my thinking process.  If I could own an iTunes directed digital copy on my computer with numerous backup copies on various hard drives, and a HD copy on [...]

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