MacMini Server???

[philstone]

Somehow I've only just realised that the MacMini Server was discontinued Oct last year...

What are people doing about losing the ability to RAID? Our critical servers are RAIDed to give us some extra resiliency, in fact one of our drives died in a mirrored server last week, which is how I've woken up to the fact that the mini servers are no more...

Cheers

 

[chrfr]

Somehow I've only just realised that the MacMini Server was discontinued Oct last year...

What are people doing about losing the ability to RAID? Our critical servers are RAIDed to give us some extra resiliency, in fact one of our drives died in a mirrored server last week, which is how I've woken up to the fact that the mini servers are no more...

Cheers

Apple's software RAID implementation is terrible anyway, prone to having failed status but not notifying anyone that it's failed until someone happens to open Disk Utility. Performance is also unremarkable at best.
One of my servers uses a Promise Pegasus2. That works much better than Apple's RAID ever did.

 

[talmy]

The mini was never suitable for critical server use anyway, which requires more redundancy than just drives. Mine does just fine with regular backups -- never lost any data. When I had a server model (the original one, 2009) I kept the two drives independent.

 

[Geeky Chimp]

You've got the WD MyBook Pro or WD MyBook Duo/ThunderBolt Duo which work pretty well too.

I agree with 'talmy' that redundancy requires much more than RAID. If its 'mission critical' a Mac Mini probably isn't the best idea for you. As an idea we have multiple servers running any important workloads with regular data replication in place which seems to work well for us.

 

[hobowankenobi]

If you really need mission critical 24/7 Mini, you might consider a bootable thunderbolt RAID 5 array. Use the internal HD as a backup for the OS/boot volume, or other non-essential storage, backups, etc.

The other thing to consider, if buying a new Mini, is that internal SSD storage option for a boot volume is fairly robust. Should be more reliable than any HD, and perhaps a HD mirror.

We have a setup such as this at work with an TB RAID 5 array, and it is great. Not a 24/7 requirement....if the SSD failed, I could still boot to the OS backup/Clone from an external drive in a pinch...until repair/replacement was ready.

 

[960design]

Somehow I've only just realised that the MacMini Server was discontinued Oct last year...

I'm with you. I only recently found this out do to a lightning strike taking out everything connected to the rear wall. UPS and lightning protection circuitry both burned through. Fortunately, insurance paid for everything, but my MacMiniServer was not available. I'm currently running a MacMini with Server software.