Mac mini storage expansion options

[lamboman]

Hi all,

Currently have a 2011 mini with the stock 500GB drive and an external 1.5TB, as a media server. No backups. At the minute I have a separate iTunes and lossless music library, so I'm looking to start from scratch and have one lossless iTunes library to be read by a separate media server application (probably MinimServer). Current solution is quite slow, noisy, and of course, unsafe (no backups).

My requirements are:

• Roughly 3TB of storage to host a media library, some DVD and BR rips (the BR rips will probably be 12GB or so at most, the quality can be 'good', that's sufficient). Not a huge amount of media, enough for me to expand. Let's say that 1.5TB of lossless rips would equate to roughly 2000+ 'normal' albums, leaving me with 1.2TB (after formatting) of space for Blu-Ray rips (100 in this case) so there's plenty there. The reality is I have way, way less music than this.
• Backup for this media.
• Backup for my two main machines, both have very little data, only 35GB including the installation. These backups don't need to be backed up - the only purpose for these backups is to allow fast restores in the event of a failure of one of these systems. Worst case scenario, I simply reinstall and grab my data back off Dropbox or the other computer; the likelihood of a main system and the backup system failing at the same time is small. In theory, this is a 'bad' idea, but I'm being realistic here.
• Quiet! It must be quiet. The Mac mini is in the same place as the hi-fi and TV, so it cannot be noisy.

I've looked at a couple of options:

• Two HGST 5K1500 drives (3TB in total) in the Mac mini using an OWC Data Doubler, and an external 2/3TB drive (probably a 2TB portable drive for quietness) to hold backup the media. Seems like the best solution to me. Should be quiet, fast, and compact.
• Two WD Red 3TB drives (RAID 1) in an external enclosure for the media, and the mini's internal 500GB drive for the backups for the computers. Only issue with this is that RAID1 can be argued to not be a backup solution (mirroring any mistakes). The enclosures at around £75-100 seem to be rather noisy from what I've read, and even at best, this will probably be far noisier than the internal drives.

Time Machine will be used for the backups. Cost for the above two solutions is roughly the same.

I have a good idea of what I want to do, but thought that I'd turn to you OcUKers to see if I've missed anything obvious!

My questions:

• What do you guys think? Have I missed any obvious other options out?
• This will probably be an HTPC in the near future. I quite fancy using Plex, seems like a great AIO solution. The Plex app only supports pushing to Plex clients (eg. using my iPhone to select another device with the Plex client app running) but I shouldn't have any problem using the media server for DLNA clients (namely a Linn DS). Any experience with Plex as a DLNA music server?

Any input is appreciated Thanks!

 

[lamboman]

Just for anybody who searches and finds this, ended up purchasing a Hornettek X2-U3. This is an AMedia controller based unit, which is what you should look for - the JMicron controllers do not play nice with OS X sleep modes at all. Hornettek do two J-Micron-based RAID enclosures called the Enterprise 2X and 4X - these are NOT recommended for Macs.