I’ve been running a full tower Windows server with a dozen drives for a decade and decided to downsize. This ministack does everything I need at a fraction of the power, noise, and heat.
I use it primarily for Plex but also host a few games servers for buddies. It fits perfectly in my entertainment center.
Spent around $200 on the Mac Mini plus $600 on the drives and enclosures. I’m using SoftRAID for RAID1.
Most Macs are overpriced, but the $599 M2 Mac Mini is an absolute STEAL compared to the rest of their lineup. And its existence drives the price of used Mac Minis down, which is also great.
It’s a pity that also the RAM and SSD are a steal.
250€ to add 8gb RAM and another 250€ to add 250gb SSD. Prices that even ten years ago didn’t make sense…
I wish they sold the M2 motherboard with standard DDR 5 and m.2 slots. I’d pay 1000€ for that and i wouldn’t even want the fancy aluminum case
Can’t you just add it yourself or are they soldered in?
No, unfortunately it’s all soldered https://www.macworld.com/article/1677460/mac-mini-upgrade-hub-storage-ethernet-sd-card-ports.html
So when the single flash chip degrades, the whole unit automatically becomes e-waste instead of a simple $25 fix
Can it transcode 4k
Don’t transcode on Plex if you can avoid it. It’s very compute-intensive and it makes your streams look like shit. Convert your videos to nice formats that most people can direct play (like x264 or x265) and turn transcoding off. It’ll keep your hardware running longer, keep your electric bill down, and your streams will look better. Win-win-win-win.
That’s assuming you can afford the storage to store multiple copies of your media.
You can convert most movies to 1080p x265 and it takes up a little over a gigabyte of space. If you’re already hosting 4K movies, why do you give a shit about another gigabyte? If you’re NOT hosting 4K movies, then you have ZERO reason to transcode, just make everything 1080p and call it a day.
Also, transcoding DOES cost you money, your electric bill goes up, even if you don’t track it or care. So spend the extra fifty bucks on a few extra terabytes now rather than spending it over the course of several months transcoding. And if you cut out transcoding, you can run Plex on VERY cheap hardware, so that saves you money too.
Transcoding. Is. Dumb.
