mac mini as a server?

[mentaluproar]

I have a mac mini being used an an HTPC, but the majority of the time, it's just sitting there running BOINC.

What would be cheaper:

- daisy chaining external FW800 drives to the mini and RAIDing them together (is that even possible) for redundancy.
- building a FreeNAS server and raidZ the drives.

With freeNAS, I would have to buy more than just the drives, and I already have the mac mini.

With the mini, I'm unsure how it could handle raiding the externals and serving me and my roommates our media and time machine shares reliably.

 

[talmy]

RAID as backup protection doesn't really work because a hardware failure could take down both drives, and you have no protection at all against theft, fire, natural disaster, or even accidental file deletion. Best to forget about RAID and instead have a second (or more) drive that you clone and keep elsewhere for backup protection.

So I'd just add externals to the mini. Without the server OS you should still be able to do all you want (even RAID if you insist).

 

[mrklaw]

That's what I did. I added 2x1TB external drives, used one for media and the other got weekly cloned from the media drive. I kept them both together but I should have taken one offsite ideally.

I then got tired of having four drives hanging off my mini, so I bought a cheap 4 bay micro server and installed unraid on it. It has the benefit of running my 24/7 apps - sabnzbd, sick beard,andminecraft server. This frees up my mini to concentrate on being a HTPC. I had tuned it before but it had slowly been clogged up with other duties.

Simple answer is you can do either, but if you do external drives ignore RAID and just back them up regularly using super duper/carbon copy cloner/chronosync

 

[Osamede]

if you do external drives ignore RAID and just back them up regularly using super duper/carbon copy cloner/chronosync

Which one is best?

 

[talmy]

IMHO Chronosync (which I do have) isn't appropriate for disk cloning.

CCC has the advantage that it is free.

SuperDuper seems more straightforward to me but needs to be registered (small cost) for the "smart" cloning which saves lots of time.

 

[mrklaw]

Which one is best?

you're looking at regularly updating media onto one drive, then mirroring that onto a backup drive? I'd use chronosync as you don't need to clone the drives.

I use superduper for cloning my actual machine, so I have a bootable backup at all times. Thats useful too.