2018 Mac Mini Owners Thread (1 Viewer)

[JohnRice]

BTW, THIS is the Amazon one. 3 1/2 years with it and I don't recall a single drop. Except, I see it's gotten bad reviews recently.

 

[Citizen87645]

I'm using an Anker model, the top pick from the Wirecutter.

The drives haven't dropped with that error message, they mount and access fine, so something is triggering a false positive for some reason.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

I've ordered the Base Mac Mini from B&H Photo, no tax , which is nice. I'm going to use it on my Samsung KS-8000, as both a Plex Server and Player, I've also ordered a 5 Bay USB C storage bay, and from the black friday sale I've ordered two 10tb WD Easystor drives, I'll shuck them and add them to the bay in Raid 0 for 20tb, the other bays I'll add in the future. I already hve some externals I can use on a Hub. I'm going to re-rip some of my content in MKV uncompressed format. I think the Base work fine streaming in house to my Devices.

 

[JohnRice]

Dave, I’d set up the drives as spanned instead of striped (RAID 0) because there will be less wear on the drives, and RAID 0 is for speed, which you definitely don’t need with a media server. Spanned is really the way to go with media playback.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

Dave, I’d set up the drives as spanned instead of striped (RAID 0) because there will be less wear on the drives, and RAID 0 is for speed, which you definitely don’t need with a media server. Spanned is really the way to go with media playback.

By spanned you mean each bay as an individual drive ?

 

[JohnRice]

No. Creating a spanned volume just joins the drives together, one after the other, to make one larger volume. RAID 0 is not intended for a media server. A spanned volume is. Plus, you can use any drives for it, and when you are running out of space, you can just add another drive to the volume. It’s the way to do it. Just google “spanned hard drive”.

It’s also called a concatenated volume. Much better and more flexible for a media srrver.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

Ok pretty easy to do in the Mac, now what happens if on disk fails? Is there any benefit to me doing this vs just leaving them all separate if I’m going to just add them to Plex?

 

[DaveF]

If you've spent the time and effort to extra 10+ TB of ripped (and possibly transcoded) media, I'd spend the money to add a third drive for single-drive parity, allowing for a single-drive failure in the RAID. If you use RAID 0, a single drive failure will lose *all* of your data. 20TB of data gone *poof*

 

[Dave Scarpa]

If you've spent the time and effort to extra 10+ TB of ripped (and possibly transcoded) media, I'd spend the money to add a third drive for single-drive parity, allowing for a single-drive failure in the RAID. If you use RAID 0, a single drive failure will lose *all* of your data. 20TB of data gone *poof*

Right well what if the are spanned I imagine the same

 

[JohnRice]

OK @Dave Scarpa , now I guess I'm confused. You said you were going to set up a RAID 0,which is a striped RAID, with the data spread evenly between two drives, in this case. Maybe you meant a RAID 1. I thought your intention was to take two 10TB drives and make them a 20TB volume. RAID 0 is intended for performance, which you don't need with a media server, where the drives really don't need to be very fast. Also, it doubles wear and tear on the drives, because they both always have to access data. If you did mean RAID 0, I suggest the two drives be spanned instead, simply because there's less wear on the drives. If you meant RAID 1, then you might consider just doing one drive with the second drive working as a regular backup, which is turned off except when it' backing up.

Until I know what your goal is, I don't know what to suggest.

I've been running a media server using iTunes for several years. I've been using spanned drives to create one volume that's big enough
to hold all the media on one volume. Currently it's (2) 8TB drives. That's backed up to a second spanned volume using older drives that I used to use for the main volume.

 

[DaveF]

For a media server, do RAID 1 with two disks. Or add a third drive and do RAID 4 or 5.

The goal, IMO, is multi-drive storage pool with a reduced risk of catastrophic data loss from drive failure.

(I have 3x5TB drives, using snapraid for two data and one parity. It’s not efficient on drive wear. But it’s super simple and pretty foolproof with a little care. And it’s free.)

 

[Dave Scarpa]

i'm a newbie to most of this i've been running a plex server for years but mostly as external drives into a mac, i have'nt really ever backed up, in all that time i think one drive went bad, i was never overtly concerned as its all data i have on disk. Now ripping does take time but i'm not sure i was planning on making any redundancy. this is what i picked up

http://a.co/d/06BibsR

 

[JohnRice]

Dave, I think the single disk mode on that enclosure is the same thing as what I suggested. RAID 1 will give automatic backup, but half the capacity. I still recommend single disk over RAID 0 since it has less wear on the drives.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

Yeah I’m pondering tuning the two 10tb drives in raid 1 so they mirror each other, still that wave 3 drives as single not backed up or mirrored. Not sure what I want to do

 

[JohnRice]

How much media do you have to store now?

 

[Dave Scarpa]

How much media do you have to store now?

Well I have about 8tb of tv shows compressed to mp4 but I’m considering re ripping some of it to straight non compressed mkv’s

 

[DaveF]

That’s not the raid enclosure I’d recommend for a media server.

 

[JQuintana]

Well I have about 8tb of tv shows compressed to mp4 but I’m considering re ripping some of it to straight non compressed mkv’s

 

[Dave Scarpa]

That’s not the raid enclosure I’d recommend for a media server.

Reviews have been good, I was looking for more direct connected device than a nas I can still return it tell me why ?

 

[JohnRice]

Reviews have been good, I was looking for more direct connected device than a nas I can still return it tell me why ?

Are you connecting it directly to your Mac? I don't even use a RAID enclosure. Just a basic 4 bay one, then I use OSX to create a spanned volume. Has worked just great for over ten years. I do back it up to another volume. If you're not sharing it over a network, I see no need for more.