Celeron said:
Here's an easy question for everyone. Right now I'm running a Shuttle XPC system with an Athlon 1800+ with 512 megs of ram as a file server. It holds things such as drivers for my pc, my itunes library, photos, documents, and a few other misc. things that I don't want to bother keeping on my main PC. This computer is on 24/7, the internal temp is around 125F, and the CPU runs at 100% CPU all the time while Folding@Home. This server also run DNS for me because RoadRunner's DNS server is often too sluggish for my liking.
My question is this. Can a Mac Mini handle the same situation? It would be on 24/7 and the CPU pegged at 100%. I'd like it to handle file sharing as well, and possibly a copy of bind to do DNS duties.
Thanks in advance!
While a mini might be able to stand up to this 24/7 operation I probably would not count on it.
Reason
1. If the mini's CPU burns up your out a whole mini.
2. If the Athlon XP 1800 burns up your out about 50 bucks to replace the CPU
3. No consumer computer is really designed to run 100% utilization 24/7
While you may have had good results so far with doing it, If you were attempting this on a much larger scale you would start to see a large percentage of failures.
The industry standard for Tier 1 manufactures of Consumer computers is around 99% uptime ( referred to as two 9s) that equates to the system crashing for some reason or another and being offline 3.5 days a year. Whereas Servers are typically built to withstand uptime of 99.9%
And Very high end equipment is built to have uptime of 99.99 or 99.999.
Systems in the 5 9's range typically have redundant everything from memory to power supplies to controller cards to sometimes even CPU's.
These systems cost serious bank.
a good example of failures showing up at a large scale.
We have 1835 Xserves. These systems run 100% Utilization 24/7
We have about 1 hardware crash every 2 to 3 weeks.
Hardware problems have been faulty memory, motherboards, power supplies, and have burned up 9 CPU's so far.
