Hardware-wise, I use a 2010 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo w/ 4 GB as my home server and it is sluggish as hell. My answer would be "it depends." Really, about what you need it for. Late to the show but saw this last week while I travelled. Granted that's mostly a one time chore though.Īpologies. I was thinking of the quad mostly to speed up ripping and transcoding stuff into the library. I'm pretty sure the dual would be plenty for the actual server work. Tsur et al make a good point about getting more bang for my buck with a dual core 2014 model though.
It's the price versus the age that's a killer. I'm also thinking more and more that a Mini would be the right machine for this… or would be if it were updated more recently. I can finally afford to get a "new" Mac for myself, so I think I will. As good as a Synology might be for most if what I do on this Mac… heck, once I start to think about getting a Mac again, it's just hard to talk myself out of it. It'll also just get me back into having a Mac around, and the fact that I don't know yet what else I want to run on it is becoming my strongest argument for getting one. If I can pick up some flavor of MacBook Pro sometime later, that'll give me something more modern, and I can still use the Mini and external drive for backing that up. It'll give me a place to run iTunes besides the Windows laptop (*shudder*), which I do for local iOS backups among other things. This is partly because I'm completely without a Mac right now. The more I talk it out, the more I think I do want to get a Mac for this application. How long has Apple been supporting older Macs? Even if there's no technical reason for a 2012 Mini to stop working, will they call it obsolete this year because it's 5 years old? Does it seem reasonable that I could get a couple more years of OS updates from the Mini? I figure at least the external drives could last to work with a newer computer after that. I'd have to add external hard drive(s) and BD-ROM to rip movies and CD's-yes, they still sell shiny plastic discs.
For example, I'm looking at a 2.3GHz quad-i7, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD for $800. I know there haven't been many good options lately, so the resale prices are kind of crazy for a 5-year old machine. So I'm considering picking up a 2012 quad-core Mac Mini from eBay. I don't have time to sink into a Hackintosh, and I'd rather get a Mac with extra local storage than run a NAS appliance, partly for more flexibility. I'd like to have something always running at home, and I'm leaning toward setting up a dedicated home server… if I get a chance for another desktop or laptop, this can stay devoted to serving Plex and whatever else. I've been Mac-less since my Power Mac G5 died some years ago… just relying on a Windows laptop from work (plus iPhone and iPad).
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