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What OS for 2012 Mini?

L T

L T

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 24, 2013
433
108
UK
Hi,

I have just repurchased my first ever Mac (the nostalgia is real!), a 2012 Mac mini 2.5/4/500 for £100 to use purely as a file server, it will be plugged in 24/7 with my external storage attached to the back. The drives will be shared over the network through the file sharing settings and accessed from my MacBook Pro. I have also set up screen sharing so I can access and control the mini from my MacBook.

I have put a fresh install of Mountain Lion on, plugged a USB in the back and all is working well with sharing over the network. 2m 25s to transfer a 2.1GB file over WiFi which is acceptable for my use case although I may try to run ethernet to the mini.

Given the age I will be replacing the 500GB HDD for a 256GB SSD.

Now this leads me onto my dilemma, everything is working fine as it is but my other drives I need to access are formatted APFS so I believe I need to take this mini up to High Sierra as a minimum? Should I leave it on High Sierra or am I best off taking it all the way to Catalina?

Thanks
 
El Capitan is fine. That’s what I’ve got on my 2010 Mini.
As far as file sharing is concerned, nothing has changed since El Cap
 
Thanks, but do I not need to take it to at least High Sierra to enable it to read my APFS drives? As that is when APFS was introduced
 
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I'd take it all the way to Catalina. It's the last OS for your model and is still supported with security updates till the end of year. I recently re-installed a fresh copy of 10.15.7 on my 2012 MP and everything works great, no regrets here
 
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I run Catalina on my 2012 Mini file server and it's fine, however I have the 2.6ghz quad-core version with 16gb RAM and mine is connected to a gigabit ethernet LAN which has access to a time capsule with 802.11ac wifi. My mini has an original Apple 256gb internal SSD which is only used for the operating system. I have four 5tb hard drives connected to the USB ports with no mouse, keyboard or monitor (I use a dummy HDMI plug).

Now, by my calculations 2100MB / 145 sec = 14.5 MB/sec which is (no offense) horrible! I would not find that acceptable in any way for a fileserver. My internal SSD clocks around 500MB/sec and the external hard drives are around 170MB/sec. Last time I checked, I was getting around 80MB/sec accessing it as a network drive over ethernet. 802.11ac wifi was around 60MB/sec.

My impression is that file sharing got slower with newer versions of MacOS, I remember getting close to 100MB/sec while running Mountain Lion. But I don't have any actual data to support that impression. So, if you're concerned about security, I'd say to run Catalina although you might want to upgrade to 16gb (maybe 8gb) for that. Otherwise, I'd just keep it on Mountain Lion. Some people feel that Macs run best with their original operating systems.

But I would really look at getting better wifi for a fileserver, I'd find it an exercise in frustration to be limited to 15MB/sec.
 
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For an APFS file server, even with just 4 GB, I'd try Catalina first and see how it goes.

The early versions of High Sierra were buggy with APFS. It got better with later versions of High Sierra, but I'd go to a later OS just to be safe. In High Sierra I wouldn't lose data with APFS, but there were weird Finder bugs for files and disk images, requiring a log out and log back in to fix. This was on a 2010 iMac.

However, you'd preferably have more RAM. 8 GB is fine. No need for 16 GB for this purpose. In fact, I run Monterey on a 2014 Mac mini with 8 GB RAM as my main work machine (business applications and VPN) with decent results.
 
Thanks all for your input, I have now installed the SSD and will be taking it to Catalina and seeing how it does with 4GB RAM. I don't really want to put any more money into it with more RAM
 
Catalina here too...will be upgrading the machine to either a Studio or to whatever Apple brings with the next mini. Once I do that, I'm thinking of playing around with the instructions on how to install Monterey on unsupported Macs.
 
Another member of the 2012 (i7 server, 16GB 2x internal SSD) Catalina club checking in. I picked mine up used a while back and have had zero issues with it.

I'm waiting on a Studio now, but the mini won't be getting retired, and I'm planning on making it a Plex server.
 
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