The number of portable hard drives I have is increasing with time at almost a constant speed. Now I use 3 hard disk on a daily bases. An 1TB drive is used for storing videos and photos I took. Also I use it as the main scratch disk for video and Photoshop editing. The second one is a 3TB drive, used for storing movies and animes. The third one is a 2TB drive, used for Time Machine backup for Macbook’s internal SSD and the 1TB drive.
Two problems have troubled me for a long time. One is that I couldn’t have all 3 drives hang to my Macbook at the same time. It’s possible to use an adapter but that will then slow down the data transfer speed, which I don’t want to see especially for the 1TB one. Another problem is the power supply for these external hard drive. For many times I was standing in front of my desk, waiting for my hard drive to eject so that I can grab my laptop and go. If there were some kind of external power supply then I can unplug the drives without worrying about breaking them.
That’s why I want a network attached storage (NAS) system. It solves my two problems, and as a bonus it makes my desk much cleaner. On Amazon there is Synology NAS, but it is too expensive. So I thought why not use my old macbook to build a NAS?
The drawing above shows the connection of my easy “NAS system”. My old MacBook is connected with the 3TB hard drive and an Airport. Through the native file sharing and screen sharing features in Mac OS X I could access the old Macbook and the 3TB hard drive wirelessly, attach them as network drives to my new Macbook’s desktop.
The setup and configuration was super easy. Now my Anime and Movie are always “online” with me!
To conclude, there are 4 highlights I really like about this system:
- Speed is good enough for steaming 720p video.
- Old MacBook itself can now be used as storage, too.
- Wireless Time Machine backup support (if you have OS X Server installed on the old MacBook)
- Screen Sharing is very fluent (in case I want to do some operation on my old MacBook).