Hi,
I am very close to purchasing a LinkStation Quad, but I have some concerns before I do. I am hoping somebody can answer these questions. Note that my primary PC is a Mac running Snow Leopard. Although I will be accessing the drive from Windows and Linux boxes as well. I do understand that setup needs to be done from a Windows PC (from what I have read).
1) I'd like to allocate a TimeMachine disk somewhere on the LS so that my Mac backs up to this. Can I do this, and do I set up a partition or is there a "special" way to accomplish this?
2) How will my Mac "see" the various drives on the LS? Will each disk mount when it is connected, or do you have to set up Shares and you only see those shares?
3) I have a program that creates a bootable image of my Mac hard drive each week. I'd like to have that image saved off somewhere on the LS when it is complete. Will the backup software be able to see the LS specific location to save this off? Is this another share/partition?
4) I've read through the boards and there seems to be some issue with Snow Leopard and Macs actually connecting to the LS. Is this still an issue with the latest firmware? Basically, if I'm on my network, I want the LS to show all the time. I don't want to have to connect or manually do something.
Thanks in advance for anybody's help!
Regards
Chicago29
Ok here we go.
A. The device can be setup on a mac, all the setup is typically done through a web browser, and both the main software compentents the Nas Navigator and the Firmware Updater are available for mac under our downloads page. Older units needed a pc to do specific things (like updating firmware) but that model has no such limitations. The only thing that may not work on a mac is the initial cd that comes with the unit but it is not essential for setup.
1. There is a time machine settings tab under the web admin page of the unit. No special partitioning is needed, the only special thing you may have to do is set up a sparsebundle in some cases. But I wouldn't worry about that until you get to it.
2. The drive is raided and in raid 5 by default. The mac will "see" the unit over the network as a single shared drive. You will access the unit using "shares" which there is only 1 by default but you can setup as many as you want.
3. If the software can recognize network drives it can save to the unit. No additional partions are needed but you could make a seperate share if desired. If it cant you could save to your computer then to the network drive.
4. The unit works fine with snow leopard but snow leopard in general has been shown to be somewhat less stable in regards to nas drives in general than older versions of osx. It is usally not an issue but if there is something it will generally lead to an increased setup time or maybe a call to tech support but not having to reconnect the drive manually whenever you need to connect to it.
That should answer all of your questions.
Cheers