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I think that use case was a very good one for the Mini, but with the price hike I just don't see why anyone would choose this latest model. You can pick up a HP

I think that use case was a very good one for the Mini, but with the price hike I just don't see why anyone would choose this latest model. You can pick up a HP MicroServer Gen8 for ~$150 or the latest ones for ~$450, and those offer tons more variety on configuration, more storage expansion capacity, and they're extremely easy to maintain (I'm far from a HP fan, but they sure can build a solid server).

scarface74 8y ago
No one should have ever bought the $499 Mac Mini before with 4Gb of RAM. The cheapest Mac Mini that anyone should have bought was at least $699 with 8GB of RAM and you still had a slow hard drive.
asdkhadsj 8y ago
I've been looking for small closet servers, this looks neat! Thanks! Any other brands/models you'd recommend?
- krylon 8y ago
  FWIW, I have a HP Microserver Gen8 with the dual-core Celeron and 16 GB of RAM, including 4 3 TB HDDs I paid about 800 bucks. I have had this machine for three years now, and it has given me no trouble whatsoever. It is quiet, reliable and for my use case, it performs well (I use it as a file server, DHCP and DNS server, plus I run a few low-end VMs on it). The one thing that was a little annoying is that it does not have UEFI firmware, and the BIOS cannot deal with GPT, so I cannot boot off the HDDs and need an additional USB flash drive for that. Other than that I cannot say a bad thing about it.
  - robotmay 8y ago
    I rigged mine to boot off an SSD wedged into the "CD Drive" bay at the top. Cheapy connector to power it off the CD power connector and a SATA cable and it works great. There's an option in the BIOS to swap the disk controller to a dumb version, which works much better for me (I use ZFS anyway so any built-in RAID stuff just gets in the way), and that picks up the SSD and lets you set it as a boot drive. I might think about rejigging my setup soon to use that SSD as an L2ARC cache and instead boot off a pair of USB sticks. 16GB of RAM max on the Gen8 is a bit of a pain with ZFS, so that might be a sensible evolution before I eventually look to get a newer model :)
    - krylon 8y ago
      I considered that option, but as far as I could find out, that would force the SATA controller in to RAID mode, making it impossible for ZFS (I use ZFS, too) to get at the SMART data from the disks. My server runs FreeBSD, and I have restricted the ZFS ARC to 8GB, so I have some RAM left for the other stuff, performance has been okay for me. Then again, a) a home network with about half a dozen client devices is not that big a challenge, and b) due to a combination of laziness and stupidity, my home network still is 100MBit, so I do not have to worry about any bottlenecks on the server. ;-)
- robotmay 8y ago
  Ah I've only used one of those unfortunately! I'm sure there must be some other similar models about :D My Gen8 has an upgraded Xeon E3 in it and runs a ZFS array; works extremely well as a media server, and transcodes very well (works pretty well with the base processor, but for multiple simultaneous streams I opted to upgrade).

scarface74 8y ago

No one should have ever bought the $499 Mac Mini before with 4Gb of RAM. The cheapest Mac Mini that anyone should have bought was at least $699 with 8GB of RAM and you still had a slow hard drive.

asdkhadsj 8y ago

I've been looking for small closet servers, this looks neat! Thanks! Any other brands/models you'd recommend?

krylon 8y ago
FWIW, I have a HP Microserver Gen8 with the dual-core Celeron and 16 GB of RAM, including 4 3 TB HDDs I paid about 800 bucks. I have had this machine for three years now, and it has given me no trouble whatsoever. It is quiet, reliable and for my use case, it performs well (I use it as a file server, DHCP and DNS server, plus I run a few low-end VMs on it). The one thing that was a little annoying is that it does not have UEFI firmware, and the BIOS cannot deal with GPT, so I cannot boot off the HDDs and need an additional USB flash drive for that. Other than that I cannot say a bad thing about it.
- robotmay 8y ago
  I rigged mine to boot off an SSD wedged into the "CD Drive" bay at the top. Cheapy connector to power it off the CD power connector and a SATA cable and it works great. There's an option in the BIOS to swap the disk controller to a dumb version, which works much better for me (I use ZFS anyway so any built-in RAID stuff just gets in the way), and that picks up the SSD and lets you set it as a boot drive. I might think about rejigging my setup soon to use that SSD as an L2ARC cache and instead boot off a pair of USB sticks. 16GB of RAM max on the Gen8 is a bit of a pain with ZFS, so that might be a sensible evolution before I eventually look to get a newer model :)
  - krylon 8y ago
    I considered that option, but as far as I could find out, that would force the SATA controller in to RAID mode, making it impossible for ZFS (I use ZFS, too) to get at the SMART data from the disks. My server runs FreeBSD, and I have restricted the ZFS ARC to 8GB, so I have some RAM left for the other stuff, performance has been okay for me. Then again, a) a home network with about half a dozen client devices is not that big a challenge, and b) due to a combination of laziness and stupidity, my home network still is 100MBit, so I do not have to worry about any bottlenecks on the server. ;-)
robotmay 8y ago
Ah I've only used one of those unfortunately! I'm sure there must be some other similar models about :D My Gen8 has an upgraded Xeon E3 in it and runs a ZFS array; works extremely well as a media server, and transcodes very well (works pretty well with the base processor, but for multiple simultaneous streams I opted to upgrade).