I have several Macs (10.6) on a wireless home network and want to add a network HDD, primarily as a drive for Time Machine to back up to. Having heard bad things about Apple's Time Capsule, I'm currently looking at buying a Western Digital 1TB NAS and connecting it via ethernet cable to a wireless router on the network. I have no experience using Time Machine, although it looks pretty straightforward.
Before trying this, I'd like to know:
1) Will this actually work? WD claim their drive is 'Time Machine ready', but how should it be formatted/partitioned? Has anyone had experience doing this? Is there a better make of drive for around the same price?
2) Assuming it's ok for backups, can I also use part of the drive to store my iTunes library (and take the pressure off my iMac's little 80Gb HDD)? If so can I use the same partition as the backup? Ditto for manual archiving of some old movie files…
Thanks.
Edit: I've just seen this other post, which has some good things to say about the Western Digital MyBook World Edition…
Best Answer
I don't have a WD but my LaCie D2 Network 2 also has Time Machine support, and it works well. You don't partition or format it, you just flag a share as needing to support Time Machine and the device takes care of everything for you.
As for sharing a partition between backup and iTunes, that's not a good idea because Time Machine will eventually use all available drive space for backups, using any extra space to increase the number of versions of files it can keep. The LaCie drive deals with this by letting you create as many shares as you want, and putting a quota on the share available to Time Machine so that it won't take over the rest of the disk. I'm nowhere near my quota so I don't know how well it works though. Presumably WD has done something similar.