Aah, our old NAS died 🙁 One of the discs where failing. This old NAS, was a Conceptronic 2-bay Ch3sNas. I installed fun-plug on it, so I could use this NAS for various other functions. (PHP / MySQL, Torrents …) Because the NAS was configured in “mirrored” mode, I did not loose any data. I’m a but paranoid about data, I do make regular backups and also upload the most important data to our clouddrive in Denmark. After replacing the defective disc, I noticed that one channel of the SATA controller was also failing, but for the rest, the NAS was functioning fine. (But hey, only one disc working, that is not reliable) We decided to buy a new NAS, a Synology DS-413, this is a 4-bay NAS. I installed 4 WD – Red – 3TB discs, and created a Raid-5 configuration. The old NAS is now sitting in our garage, and we sync the most important data from the Synology to the Ch3sNas, every night. The Synology resides in one side of the house, and the Ch3sNas in the opposite side of the house. Whenever something happens, I hope to take at least one NAS with me, out of the house.
This new NAS triggered a cascade of a few new devices in and around the house 🙂
First of all, I bought an external USB BluRay burner. Due to the large size of our pictures (10 Mpixels), I decided it was time to take the number of backup discs down. On one BluRay. On one DL BluRay disc, do fit about 5 DL DVDs. Also backup time is drastically decreased.
The Iconbit XDS7 3D, also moved to the bedroom. In the living we now have a new Mede8er 600x3D. This works much better now 🙂 This device also had some improvements, in comparison to the Iconbit XDS7 3D …
Because our new NAS, does have Airplay functionality, we bought an Apple TV. We use this mainly to view trailers, and listen to music from the NAS on our home entertainment system. One of the other advantages is the possibility to mirror the ipad and imac screen to our “big ass TV” … We als bought an Apple Airport Express, to have music from the NAS, streamed to the surround system in the bathroom.
In the garden and in my (hobby)garage, I also wanted to have Airplay available. I have about 3 Raspberry Pies, and I configured 2 of them, to be an Airplay receiver. (This is cheap, about 30 euro, compaired to the 90 euro for a real Airport Express) I installed the default Debian Pi image onto the RPI, and installed Shairport on it. (This is a freeware implementation of the Airplay protocol) For the RPI that we use in the garden, I didn’t want to put network cabling in the garden. I bought an Edimax EW-7811-UN USB/wifi dongle, and installed it on the RPI. Also, the onboard sound on the RPI is not that great, so I added an “HDMI to vga/sound” converter, and attached some speakers to this converter, which sounded much better !