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Reusing a early 2009 Mini

J

jbsmithmac

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 11, 2011
244
0
Hi all,
I'm resurrecting an early 2009 mini for some light server type tasks...at least it will always be on. It won't be my primary machine, so I'm going to run it headless.

Right now it has 4GB ram and a 160GB hard drive, running 10.8 ML.

The tasks that it would run is FTP at night for some website stuff and possibly a PLEX server to stream music and video from my Synology.

With that, would you think I should upgrade the memory to 8GB and to a SSD?


In my late 2009 MBP I've done this upgrade in and it works like a charm...but it's mostly just a internet browser...nothing heavy (well there's some automator/apple scripts i run on it but thats just internet traffic mostly).


Thanks!
 
It will run a bit better with 8GB RAM but I question whether it's really necessary. I would change the HDD. I put a Scorpio Black into my late 2009 Mini, 750GB and spinning at 7200 rpm machine runs really sweetly. I suppose it depends upon your storage requirements and budget, if I could have afford/justified a 500 SSD I would have gone that route but I felt 750 HDD was better price/performance/capacity.

My recommendation would be Mavericks first. Clean up the HDD a bit and monitor how it runs memory wise, don't focus on usage but swap/pressure graph. I suspect it will show 4GB is fine. Then swap the HDD for what you want/need.
 
Yeah I am betting that 4GB of memory is probably enough, but a nice SSD will help much more.

I don't have many storage requirements because the mini will be hard wired to the gigabit router which also has a 16TB NAS attached to it...so that's where the storage will come in.

I had an issue with Mavericks and my NAS before (NAS not showing up natively in the finder window as a shared item)...which is why I was going to stay at 10.8.5.

Is there a speed/performance benefit to having Mavericks installed on this early 2009 mini (I know it will technically support it).
 
I have a Toshiba 1gb sshd in mine and it works really well. Came in a kit from OWC with the tools needed for pretty cheap. If you're doing server type stuff, you won't need the ssd, but more storage would be better, IMO.
 
Well a bit of a correction...the machine (just received today) looks actually to be a late 2009 mini because its 2.26Ghz with 160GB hard drive and 4GB RAM.

So far it seems to be able to handle whatever I throw at it (lots of updating, file transferring, time machine backup, etc) all at once.

I can tell that a SSD would speed it up greatly, but that may not be necessary for it's intended use. I don't need much space on it either...I could probably get away with a 128GB SSD.

I'm still amazed at how long a mac can be usable/relevant as compared to a windows machine (In my opinion that is - I've had at least a dozen of each).
 
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