Mac Mini Refresh THUNDERBOLT 2 ???

[Abacab]

Looking to upgrade our aging Mac Pro Tower and Promise Storage Via Fiber.
We are an Ad agency with 86 workstations and the only service running is File sharing. (All other services cloud based, Gmail etc. )
Was looking at the new Promise Thunderbolt Raid, however the mini's lack of Thunderbolt 2 pushes us into a MacPro Tower. Shelling out 3K for only file sharing seems a waste. Windows server options were looked at but after you factor licensing, support etc., you are at the MPT price point.
Anybody in a similar situation?

SIDE NOTE, We have about 16 TB of live data.

 

[Mago]

Don't worry about TB2, 16tb of data seems very low for 86 workstations.

The fact about Thunderbolt 2 and raid storage it's that you need to populate it with SSD just to fill 1/3 of its bandwidth, doing that with spinners it's an joke actually few raid reach 2/3 of TB1 bandwidth, and finally there are the big bottleneck the NIC, minis comes with an single 1gb NIC about 1/80 of the bandwidth of TB2 can drive thru, so no case to worry on the mini on TB2 when other factors penalize harder the system's performance (while it's an big possibility TB2 to come with the next update).

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If you're experimenting bottlenecks on your network, consider to move to an Nas with multiple NIC thus is the key bandwidth factor to consider (combine multiple nic thru an link aggregation enabled switch it's the most effective way to deal this problem, while TB2 it's irrelevant here)