Western Digital My Book Live drives can get the flashing green light of death. They boot up, start talking to themselves and don't stop, locked in an endless read-write loop. Heaven knows what they are reading and writing, but that's what they are doing. Hold the device and feel the disk rumbling away to itself. A reset does not help. The drive becomes invisible to the outside IP world, so I assume it's failing to load some of its software. Good thing I did a backup of it in March. It was pretty darn old: I must have bought it in 2013 or so. (You do not know how long I just spent with my Calendar app trying to work that out.)
The My Book Live was a 2TB network drive: it had ethernet connectivity. Its main use was to hold my iTunes files so I could stream on my other iDevices, and load up my iPhone with music now and again.
They don't make ethernet drives like that anymore. Now the choice is between USB3 portable drives, USB3 desktop drives, and NAS units. Or Cloud storage.
Cloud services reserve the right to scan your content for copyright infringement and other naughties, and delete at will. Not that I have any content like that, but there is no appeal to Apple, so why take a chance? As well as that, I would be at the mercy of Talk-Talk. It so much as rains for twenty minutes and my alleged high-speed broadband drops to half-pace, putting them in breach of contract. I can live with the 20 / 7 Mbps that results, and it does seem to sort itself out after a few days. On the other hand, HDD's have mechanical failures and I bet NAS's get OS problems as well.
Nevertheless, it's worth having the costs.
5GB free at iCloud
2TB at £6.99
iCloud = £83.88 / year
2TB external HDD approx £70 = 10 months of iCloud
4TB Synology DS218Play £400 (2TB storage with Raid 1) = 57 months of iCloud = 5.5 external drives
2TB external SSD approx £320 = 4xHDD or 46 months iCloud
1TB external SSD approx £150 = 2xHDD or 21 months iCloud
512GB on Air £200
2TB on Air £800
(Note that Apple internal SSD storage is more than twice the price of external SSD storage.)
We text-people don't need lots of storage. It's photographers, video-makers and serious musicians who need serious storage, fast graphics cards and 8-core processors. If I was one of those, I would already have a NAS. Not all NAS are made by Synology, but it's the only name you hear in consumers circles. I could in theory get away with 500GB of storage: my music is around 120GB, my photos including Photos Library are about 15GB, and Calibre back-up is about 5GB.
Of course, using drives to share music is just so 2014. So audiophile. I mean, do I even Roon? https://roonlabs.com I dream about Roon-ing. Not so much having a subscription, but leading a life that would make Roon necessary. If you dropped a lifetime subscription in my lap, I would thank you very much. But I just can't justify it.
I listen to music on CDs. I watch movies and foreign cop shows on DVD. I stream music from Spotify, and I have been hitting the Above and Beyond live concerts on You Tube recently. I stream movies from MUBI and Curzon Home Cinema via my Apple TV. I have no desire to download anything.
If I want to stream music in other rooms, I can. It's called Spotify + Sonos. Spotify has all the music I do and a bit more. Without that I would have needed a NAS.
Which is cross-product substitution for you. £400 of Synology is 40 months of Spotify. This is a no-brainer of a decision. Unless you think you can tell the difference between a 320kps stream and a 4Mps uncompressed stream.
A NAS can provide back-up especially if it's RAID 1 or above, but one should still backup the NAS now and again, and that means portable drives. Which I have already.
So this is what I did. I re-set my Music directory to my Air and imported the files from the last backup. That leaves me with 60GB spare after clean-up, which is enough. Then I copied all my content directories onto a portable drive. After that fiddling around, I decided to find a proper backup / sync program, and found FreeFileSync. It's pretty easy to work out how to use it. I trialled it, it worked nicely, so I gave them a donation. It's now a whole lot easier to do backups.
Let's face it, I barely used the My Book Live. So replacing it with a more expensive NAS would be silly. Next time around I will spend money on additional storage in my iDevices instead.
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