I use a Synology DS2125j with 2 WD 3GB Red drives as the primary drive for music and TimeMachine for my iMac. I don't keep the music file set on the iMac where I have a large file set of photographs. Had a very capable 5 year old ReadyNAS but swapped it out and enjoy the same fast performance and features but with a more intuitive interface. The configuration is their SHR - effectively RAID 1- a simple sync between the 2 drives. The Synology is wired to the router with my iMac which I use to download and rip music. Following this I use ChronoSync wirelessly to update my mac mini which hosts the music for my system. I also have 2 WD 1TB Passports, 1 for each computer, which I configure as 'bootable' and update every 2 weeks for offsite storage (a friend's house) 'cause, as safestanil mentioned above, RAID is not failsafe. So effectively I have the original rips on the Synology with a hot copy, a copy on the mac mini and an off site copy. It's rather a belt and suspenders arrangement but for around $500.00 will provide back-up for almost any local disaster. There are tempting cloud solutions and I may consider them but discovered that uploading large file sets can be verrrrrrrrry long - days, or months if it's the initial upload. And to perform an entire restore usually requires the provider send an expensive hard disk.
Speed is not an issue in either importing new music or synchronizing between the 2 macs (other than the original load to the mac mini of 800 albums). Kept the hard copies and hope to never have to re-rip them again.
Speed is not an issue in either importing new music or synchronizing between the 2 macs (other than the original load to the mac mini of 800 albums). Kept the hard copies and hope to never have to re-rip them again.