Mac mini M1 Home Server

[Heart Break Kid]

Thoughts on using the M1 as a home server?
Current use case...I have an OWC Thunderbay 4 mini with 8tb SSD that Im using to house media, documents etc attached to a current Mac mini via TB3. I have a USB that's attached to a seagate 8tb HDD that I use as a Time Machine drive for all the Macs in my house. I also have 2x 1tb NVME Sabrent Rockets that Im using almost like a mini Dropbox that my wife and I use to share documents/pictures etc

Any obvious limitations beyond the lack of extra two TB3 ports that you guys feel would seriously cripple this machines ability to perform these tasks?

Would this M1 be able to deal with simultaneous users trying to access data (i.e. stream more than 1 movie at one time?). Think it can handle Plex transcoding?

I know we will have a better idea once real world use cases start popping up but I would love some educated insights !

 

[velocityg4]

I'd wait until Plex updates their server for ARM on Mac. Which they'll probably do soon as they support a whole bunch of ARM devices already with their server.

Thunderbolt won't be an issue unless you are using a 100 Gb fiber optic connection to your current server. As your network is the bottleneck.

Outside of Plex. You probably wouldn't notice much difference between your current Mini and a ten year old computer with a 10GbE and NVMe SSD (PCIe card) for file sharing.

The big what issue is transcoding. It'll certainly stink until Plex is ARM native. It may also be worse on anything using hardware acceleration for decoding/transcoding. Which I'm not sure if Plex does on Intel's iGPU. Plex's support for hardware transcoding/decoding already lags behind software transcoding/decoding. So, I wouldn't expect support for Apple's iGPU anytime soon.

Given how well the likes of iPads and iPhones do with encoding video. When hardware acceleration is supported. I expect the Mac Mini ARM to handle high bitrate HEVC 4K transcoding without breaking a sweat. That's when and if the Plex team offers hardware acceleration.

That also means all your video files have to be in the right container and use the right codec for hardware acceleration. Plus your client device has to support a format which Plex and the ARM Mac may output via hardware acceleration.

 

[Heart Break Kid]

I'd wait until Plex updates their server for ARM on Mac. Which they'll probably do soon as they support a whole bunch of ARM devices already with their server.

Thunderbolt won't be an issue unless you are using a 100 Gb fiber optic connection to your current server. As your network is the bottleneck.

Outside of Plex. You probably wouldn't notice much difference between your current Mini and a ten year old computer with a 10GbE and NVMe SSD (PCIe card) for file sharing.

The big what issue is transcoding. It'll certainly stink until Plex is ARM native. It may also be worse on anything using hardware acceleration for decoding/transcoding. Which I'm not sure if Plex does on Intel's iGPU. Plex's support for hardware transcoding/decoding already lags behind software transcoding/decoding. So, I wouldn't expect support for Apple's iGPU anytime soon.

Given how well the likes of iPads and iPhones do with encoding video. When hardware acceleration is supported. I expect the Mac Mini ARM to handle high bitrate HEVC 4K transcoding without breaking a sweat. That's when and if the Plex team offers hardware acceleration.

That also means all your video files have to be in the right container and use the right codec for hardware acceleration. Plus your client device has to support a format which Plex and the ARM Mac may output via hardware acceleration.

That is a detailed and thoughtful response! I appreciate it very much.