new members of the family

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My home network has seen three changes lately.

The first, which I've been wanting to do for ages but hadn't quite gotten 'round to yet, is a new Mac Mini. My old Mini, the last of the PowerPC minis, was my media server. It was hooked up to a pile of external drives, which housed my ever-growing iTunes library and some video. On my old Mini, iTunes was taking more than five minutes to launch. New Mini? It launches instantly. I can also run the iTunes cover art screensaver, which ground my poor old Mini to a halt. Oh, and Front Row is quite nifty, and there are some unsupported third-party plug-ins for it which make it even more useful. I can't believe I waited this long to upgrade. I had been watching my Netflix queue through my Xbox, but now that I've got a Mini that can actually run Silverlight, I wonder if I'll find myself using it instead of the Xbox.

The second change is a NAS, specifically the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer Edition. The pile of external drives hooked up to the old Mini was okay, but it meant that we didn't have backups of any of it. The idea of having to recreate my iTunes library brought tears to my eyes. Plus I had to manually back up the other machines in the house, and let's be honest that manual backups are undone backups. There are three drives in the NAS right now, giving me a total of 2.75TB of storage. It now houses the iTunes library, which the Mini accesses over the network, and the Xbox can access it via streaming too. Now it's set up to be the target for laptop backups for Time Machine.

Finally, I've gone to gigabit Ethernet throughout the home (except for my ancient lampshade iMac, which doesn't support gigabit). It's immensely faster.

What changes to the home network are on the horizon? Well, the day before the NAS arrived, my old MacBook hard drive died a horrid death. Short of replacing the heads, which is officially not cheap, I lost a whole lot of data. So since my MacBook now has a virgin install of Leopard on it, I'm considering selling it and replacing it with a shiny new iMac (just in time for the summer Mac release of Sims 3!). After that, I think that the home network will be unchanged for some time (barring a massive hardware failure, knock on wood ... ).