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.
I haven’t tried. The vast majority of my streaming is in the same network and direct play at 1080p. The rest is remote when I’m at work at 480p because I have to use data instead of WiFi.
I’ve heard that the M1 Mac Minis can transcode at 4k but I didn’t want to shell out the cash for it.
They can, but only one stream, and it’s spotty. I’ve got a Synology, and I tried to see if I could run another Plex instance on an M1. It wasn’t as amazing as I had hoped.
That’s disappointing. I wonder if the M2 is more capable. Granted at that price point there’s little reason to go Mac instead of Linux or even Windows.
Oh also, I just found out that Plex doesn’t take advantage of the GPU on the M series as of now, so either wait, or go Intel.
It doesn’t seem that much faster. As much as I love apple, I think you’d get more bang for your buck using a PC with specific hardware geared towards this.
Admittedly I was mostly drawn to the clean form factor of the mini stack. It’s just so pretty.
It was a happy bonus that Plex was originally designed for Mac and works flawlessly on Mac hardware.