NAS that also works for an iphoto library

Posted by: mutterback on 28 September 2012

I've been endlessly frustrated with a Lacie NetworkSpace2 that I originally bought for a UPNP server (bottom line - its too slow, and I've had to restore from scratch at least 3 times.) I've now happily converted to a VortexBox.  However, I'm still trying to use the NAS for backup and photo sharing.

 

Anyone have any luck with an NAS to store an iphoto library?  I've finally got around to merging all my photos into one library - which is too large to reasonably store on my laptop. But the performance of the NAS continues to rankle, which I should have expected.

 

Am I asking to much of a consumer NAS?

Posted on: 28 September 2012 by PinkHamster

I don't know what iPhoto is, or what is so special about it, but I can recommend QNAP. I have an outdated model from 3 years back and it is plenty powerful to run UPnP and Squeezebox server software. The current models should be even more powerful.

Posted on: 28 September 2012 by garyi

Qnap is excellent but iPhoto is not.

 

iPhoto will insist on storing everything in one super library which is fine until such time as it gets out of hand. As someone who uses Aperture I can tell you beyond a few gig over the network its not fun.

 

Have not used iphoto for a long time but it does now offer the option of copying or not the items to the library which would indicate you can reference them. Aperture does not like network look ups not sure about iPhoto.

 

QNAP is however an awesome product. You can expect to see regular updates, recently the photostation was introduced allowing you to share with whomever the photos you want, directly from your NAS. Obviously a decent upload speed is required for this to be of any use to anyone.

 

I do not have a lot of experience in NASes beyond QNAP (And drobo but lets not go there)

 

In short QNAPs are quick, smallnetbuilder (google it) has lots of info on NASes, QNAP always feature highly and I see throughputs of around 50MB/s down and 20MB/s up for a 300 qui device that is even today pretty damn good and mine is over 2 years old.