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michaelsviews

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Sep 25, 2007
1,518
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New England
Having NOT owned one and contemplating getting one and filling the HD bays up , can this be setup as a file server persay with the NON server OS?

I know this may sound ridiculous, but hey I asked.

Thanks
 
Umm I have never thought about that, but my answer would be yes and no. You can direct a file server to a drive, but your MacPro must always be on if you intend to serve some sort of files.

You can get a MacPro and use an external NAS drive. I do this and once I set it up, I can access the NAS drive from anywhere. The macpro is not necessary to use a NAS drive, it just happens to be my setup.
 
Having NOT owned one and contemplating getting one and filling the HD bays up , can this be setup as a file server persay with the NON server OS?

I know this may sound ridiculous, but hey I asked.

Thanks

YES! Mac OS X client can pretty much do anything that Mac OS X server does with just a little more work. If all you want to do serve files via AFP, FTP, HTTP or SMB then you are good to go with 10.5 client by just checking a few boxes under System Preference.
 
I agree the Mac Pro is more than capable with the desktop OS. I do say its extreme overkill if Fileserving is all its going to be doing tho (I have just upgrded my NAS by building a quality little Quad core PC with 4GBRam and good components - cos me under £400).

If It must be a Mac then getting a Quad (single CPU) Xeon 2.8 would be an awesome machine. the RAID built into OS X is very good.

:)
 
I purchased memory for my iMac desktop from EDGE. If you know anything about iMac, then you know that it requires 667Mhz, 200-pin, 5300 PC2 DDR RAM. I wait days and days, finally my memory comes, only for me to install it and find out that it does not work. When i called customer support at EDGE. They inform me that they had sent me 667Mhz, 200-pin, 6400 PC2 DDR RAM. (6400 instead of the 5300, which i specifically requested, and paid for) Now, I wouldn't even be upset if it was an accident, but the customer support rep told me that it was intentional because they were running low on the memory that i requested (not out-of-stock, RUNNING LOW), so they decided that they would send me 6400 and hope that it would automatically clock itself down to the right speed once installed, WHICH OBVIOUSLY DIDN'T WORK. Then they tell me i have to basically send them back the memory which would take 3-4 business days, then they would process it, which would take 1-2 business days, then they would ship me the memory that i asked for in the first place, which would take 3-4 business days. So now i have to wait a week and a half because they decided to experiment on my computer by sending me memory i did not ask for. I don't know about you, but that killed their reputation with me. I advise anyone out there to stay far away from EDGE memory, or anything that they are selling. To me if a company screws up, they should be doing everything in their power to make it right with that customer. Last time i checked losing customers is NOT how you stay in business. Long story short, EDGE sucks. DONT BUY FROM EDGE......

Ummm...... OK. I'm going to assume that because is says "macrumors newbie" under your name, that you clicked the wrong button while trying to post a new thread and while reading this one. No problem, just navigate your way to the "iMac" sections of this forum then click "new thread" at the upper left side of the page, right above the forum stickies.
 
Mac Pro as a file server

On extra note. I am a photographer and we use a Mac Pro (2008, intel quad) as a file server. We have five 1 TB drives and three 1.5 TB drives attached to an Areca 1680 raid card, for two file stores, 1 - 4TB, 1 3TB.
We also use Link aggregation between our two Mac Pro desktops and the Mac Pro "server". performance on the desktop with network files is nearly the same as local mounted files. you'll need to find an ethernet switch that supports link aggregation. We use some cheap Linksys SLM2008s we found on buy.com.
 
YES! Mac OS X client can pretty much do anything that Mac OS X server does with just a little more work. If all you want to do serve files via AFP, FTP, HTTP or SMB then you are good to go with 10.5 client by just checking a few boxes under System Preference.

Any chance you could elaborate on this, "System Preferences"

There is load balancing also , that I am interested in, if you or anyone else has an information / knowledge about this.
 
Any chance you could elaborate on this, "System Preferences"

There is load balancing also , that I am interested in, if you or anyone else has an information / knowledge about this.

System Preferences is like the Control Panel in widows.

You can access it from the Apple menu in the upper left hand corner of the screen or in the Dock. The icon you want to look for in System Preferences is "Sharing".

What kind of load balancing do you want to do? Are you thinking along the lines of disturbed computing/clustering or ethernet link aggregation?
 
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