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Intergrated graphics-Mac Mini
- Thread starter LoganT
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A SCSI card in a non-professional machine? No. A normal graphics card would be nice but would sacrifice on size too much, hence the MXM proposal.
I guess, ideally what they should do with the mini, which *may* be possible with an even tighter fit in the current model is give it an MXM slot, give it a single eSATA port (now that one'd be easy to add) and give it an ExpressCard slot. How does that sound?
Yeah but what kind of a consumer would want or need a SCSI card?? If you're so desperate for SCSI then go and buy a Dell. Apple does not cater for the ultra minority of people. Just because you want what many people would call a 'pro' technology out of a bottom end consumer machine does not mean Apple will or ever should add it!
A consumer responsible about her backups.
Anyway, you can keep the mini at the bottom end. I always said I want a midrange machine.
"Go buy Dell": typical absurd fanboy response.
I didn't say "add SCSI". I said "provide PCIe slot so that I can add SCSI. Other people can add other things.
And anyway, there would be nothing crazy about a Mac with on-board SCSI, as they used to have that. This is another of the evil dumb-down decisions in the history of Apple.
I know what you're saying. But Steve Jobs is too stubborn. He has to realize that not all people who want PC's want integrated graphics. Or 4 video cards, and no PCI slots. I'm trying to make my ideas as simple as I can. Because I think this is as far as Steve will ever go.
I can back up just fine without SCSI, but hey that's just me.
As everyone has said the Mini is a consumer machine. SCSI is not consumer level hardware. Graphic cards are consumer level hardware, as are normal hard drives.
I don't see any benefits of SCSI other than it is a little faster but for a lot extra money.
A PCIe Ultra320 SCSI card for PC is $150. That's not a lot of money. Ultra160 is enough and it would be even cheaper.
If you want to backup to fast tapes of a good size, the only "low-end" alternative is SCSI. That is, going to ebay and buying used stuff two generations behind the state of the art which companies discard. It's cheaper and better than any new consumer solutions one can get.
If you want to backup to fast tapes of a good size, the only "low-end" alternative is SCSI. That is, going to ebay and buying used stuff two generations behind the state of the art which companies discard. It's cheaper and better than any new consumer solutions one can get.
I think its specs need to be in line with the macbook's, and give them both dedicated graphics
Buying the same components in bulk would definitely help the price...
Tapes? You still use tapes?
Buy an external hard drive and use that for back up. You could buy a nice 1TB external hard drive for a good price these days. Or buy 2 500GB drives if you want redundancy. A lot faster than tapes plus a 500GB will cost you only slightly more than the controller you are buying, not to mention the cost of the tape drive itself.
I had a quick look at HP Ultrium Tape drives and they all cost $2000 plus. An Sony 104GB drive costs about $670. You could get over 2TB of external 500GB hard drives for that price. 2.5TB if you include 150 for the controller.
I've not even included the price of tapes.
Why in gods name do you need tapes for back up? Why in gods name would anyone want to subject themselves to the torture of tape back ups in this day and age.
I can have as many copies as I want with tapes. The newest tape drives are faster than hard disks (I don't buy those because they are expensive).
A used LTO1 100GB native (up to 200 compressed) external drive can go for as little as $120.
There is no torture. Even with my crippling FireWire/SCSI converter and my even slower cube, incremental backups go very fast. If I perform a full backup, I need to do 1 tape change (that because I don't have much space for a small autoloader, which seem even easier to get).
A used LTO1 100GB native (up to 200 compressed) external drive can go for as little as $120.
There is no torture. Even with my crippling FireWire/SCSI converter and my even slower cube, incremental backups go very fast. If I perform a full backup, I need to do 1 tape change (that because I don't have much space for a small autoloader, which seem even easier to get).
With the money you waste on all these "back ups" you could have bought yourself a nice new machine.
What are you talking about? You buy a new machine, you then a Western Digital My Book 320 GB HD for 100 dollars. You hook it up to your machine then presto, you have backup!
No you don't.
320 GB is overkill for me. But for you, then buy a 500 GB HD for 130 dollars.
Not true. Lightning won't damage the contents of the drive, only the controlling electronics.
You'll only have damaged hardware. All your data would be safe.
In the case of fire i think i'd be happier knowing i had a metal hard drive than a plastic (easy to melt) tape.
Oh and by the way. Those maxtor drives come with an intelligent back up solution which only backs up the changes to files rather than everything. Kind of like time machine. So unless you create and delete hundreds of mb's of files a day then I don't think 500GB will be too big for you.
Well anyway enjoy using your tape back ups. I'll go with a more modern approach which is cheaper and faster, especially for random access to back ups of files.
Just as bad or worse than what would happen if you were writing to a tape. So no point there.
Well that depends on the damage. Usually a lightning strike will only damage the power supply of the computer or external drive. The drive itself will be left untouched.
If you are unlucky then the controller is damaged. All you need to do then is to replace the controller board (these are easily replaced) to get your data back.
If you are very unlucky then there are places you can pay, which is costly but you'll have to be very unlucky to get to that stage.
However if the bolt is powerful enough to do this much damage then more than likely it would have zapped your tape drive and melted the tape into it.
Unless of course you took the tape out but then again you can always just unplug the back up drive when you are not using it.
This would only corrupt the last file written. Not the drive itself. All data on a hard drive is easily retrievable even if the File Allocation Table is corrupted. There is free software out there (including disk utility somewhat) which will repair the file allocation table with correct data if needed.
So that's three invalid points. Wanna try some more?