Western Digital Sentinal 12Tb

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BTR

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#99908 29-Mar-2012 15:43

Hi,

I am looking at getting a WD Sentinal 12Tb NAS box, has anyone have one or used one of these devices with a Mac,. The WD site is very brief with its info. I need to know if they support AFP or if a Mac will only connect via Bonjour.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Cheers
Blake

gehenna

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#601992 29-Mar-2012 15:50

Is this for personal or company use? If it's personal I think it's a rip off, and you're better off building a $500ish PC to act as the NAS and add your own storage up to whatever size you want.

Mark

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#602016 29-Mar-2012 16:24

Apparently it does support AFP (remember Bonjour is just a protocol for discovery not the actual data transfer), but from reports I've seen AFP performance sucks and it's recommended to use SMB even with an OSX client .... but that of course would stop any Time Machine magic.

If you can live with less than stellar after sales support I can recommend the Thecus N4200Pro, I have one in an almost purely OS X environment and performance is fantastic! (2 clients, Mac Mini and iMac, can hit it for a combined throughput of 160MB to 180MB/s write and 200MB to 210MB/s read!)
Just the software is a bit iffy if you want all the fancy modules and support can be "challenging" (Taiwanese company), I've had great support myself but others have not.

BTR

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#602065 29-Mar-2012 17:48

Its for business use, my work already has a Thecus NS5200 Pro however Thecus no longer make firmware updates for this model so I have had to hack OS X 10.7 to get it to work.

I have looked at Seagates Black Armor however it doesn't appear to support AFP. WD normally make pretty good gear, have multiple WD TV Live units at home and numerous external and internal HDD's

Mark

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#602078 29-Mar-2012 18:08

Maybe take a look at Qnap or Synology, they are supposed to make nice kit, not had experience myself.
Or Iomega have managed to get with the game lately and make some fairly decent kit now, it does have AFP + time machine support.

In regards to your existing N5200pro ... take a look at this module : http://forum.thecus.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2466
It puts in a Lion compatible netatalk module so you'd not have to hack your 10.7 machines.