With a SSD drive installed, the Mini just flies.
It is way cheaper than the Apple BTO option, plus I get to choose which fast SSD drive I want in. I recently purchased a Mac Mini Core i5 2.3Ghz to deal with more HD video work and upgraded it to take a second SSD drive. In this case, a fast Dual Core with Turbo Boost engaged will be FASTER than a Quad of a slower clock speed in single process type application, but the newer Core i5 can run up to 4 threads, simulating somewhat 4 virtual cores, so really it is application and usage dependent.
However, some Mac software are not multi-core aware. If you use Handbrake a lot which takes advantage of the multi-core of the Quad Core, then Quad will be faster than Dual Core. Raid 0 stripe mode essentially doubles your hard drive throughput, but because the Sandy Bridge Intel Core i series chip is a powerful and efficient CPU, there won't be a huge latency lag associated with previous software RAID setup.ĭual Core vs Quad Core is really dependent on software used. You can achieve the same thing somewhat with Carbon Copy Cloner, but it is not as seamless as RAID 1. In the event of a boot drive failure, you can still boot from your second drive. If you set up your Mini with software RAID 1, then what this does is whenever your first drive is being written with data, the second drive is mirrored with the same data. With 2 drives on your server, you usually have 2 RAID choices - Stripe (Raid 0) or Mirror (Raid 1). The only difference is that you need your Mac Mini to do the managing and controlling of the RAID array as opposed to the dedicated RAID controller with the hardware option. Software RAID and hardware RAID are the same thing operation wise. :-) I'd appreciate any knowledgeable input here! Does anyone know, if such larger drives are supported in Mac Mini, or whether they aren't due to temperature constraints? I already found out, which connector cable I need from the Apple spare parts to add a second harddrive to the regular Mac Mini, so the plugging in itself is not the problem, but the making sure it runs smoothly over time in the small space. Now the question is: how much of a difference does the quad core make compared to a duo core when just 2-5 users are working with the Mac Mini? Plus Parallels virtualization on it?Ĥ.) And this is just a question: The regular Mac Mini obviously can be nicely pimped with a second hard drive as well, which means, I could throw out the one 500GB disk and either build in 2x 1TB disks or even larger ones. The regular Mac Mini doesn't have the quad core option. But most of the server services are hold in memory anyway, aren't they? So would the SSD not only speed up the startup and shutdown, but leave the running phase unmodified? The one harddisk then is too small to hold all storage data anyway, so it doesn't make so much sense.ģ.) don't use the Mac Mini server but use a regular Mac Mini The SSD could hold the OS, thus speeding it up considerably, I suppose. Doesn't leave much space for storage then (or said differently: it's too small for the data storage anyway). Is it really useful then? And it would mean that the system itself and the data store are on the same RAID set. I see the following options:ġ.) just use the Mac Mini server with standard 2x500GB.
I am a bit confused about the optimal system setup.
I'm kinda leaning towards this unless I can find someone who has managed to boot Windows 7 or 8 on RAID0 somewhere on this planet.I consider buying a Mac Mini as server system. I don't have to lift a finger to make this work, but it will effectively mean I'll be plugged in when I need to use Windows natively (as opposed to using a VM). Option 3 is to only use Boot Camp when I have my external drive connected.
Again, I don't think Boot Camp supports this, so I'd have to find another way to install and boot. Option 2 is to make a C and D drive and just make one the boot volume.
There also appears to be a difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 I'm NOT a windows expert and I think most windows users who use RAID end up using a hardware controller due to lack of OS support. I only just discovered that Apple's Boot Camp doesn't support this configuration, however Boot Camp isn't the only way to run windows and was wondering if anybody knew a method to run Windows on RAID 0 on a Mac.
I'm going to be installing 10.10 or 10.11 fresh on two 850 Pro SSDs using RAID 0. I have a MacbookPro8,3 early 2011 17" i7 with a "Intel series 6 chipset" SATA controller.