#Mac mini server setup guide mac#

However, Luna is a lot faster, less laggy, and has better resolution than a remote desktop app. Unlike Jump Desktop, this only works when IвЂ™m on my home network.

#Mac mini server setup guide mac#

While the original use case mostly focused around using the iPad as a second display for a laptop to get more screen real estate the release of the 2018 Mac mini created a lot of interest in using Luna and the iPad as the primary display. Luna is a hardware dongle that plugs into your Mac and lets you use an iPad as an external display. However, the most common way for me to access the mini when IвЂ™m at home is using Luna Display. It allows me to log in to the mini from anywhere using an application on my iMac or iPad. IвЂ™m using Jump Desktop to provide remote access. As a server, it trundles along without my intervention most of the time, but I do need to get on it occasionally. The mini runs headless, without a display attached. ItвЂ™s not really very consequential in the grand scheme of things, but I do like the space gray color.

I did stick with the stock 8GB of RAM, but that can be upgraded in the future (albeit with some difficulty). In order to future proof this machine a bit I bought the higher-end configuration with a 6-core i5 processor and a 256GB hard drive. I thought the base model might be too limited if I even wanted to use it as a desktop. My 2011 mini has, at various times, been my main home desktop, a headless server, and a secondary desktop machine at work. However, one of the great things about the Mac mini is how flexible it is. So I went ahead and bought one of the new 2018 minis.ДЇor the home server role, I probably could have gotten by just fine with the base model. I had been planning to initially try this out with an old mid-2011 Mac mini, but the old mini gave up the ghost just as I was getting started with this project. While a Mac mini was more expensive than a Synology, I could also reuse some external hard drives I already had on hand rather than having to buy new drives to populate the Synology, meaning a Mac mini would actually be a bit cheaper up front. However, I realized that many of my issues were with network attached storage in general, rather than the Drobo in particular. Certain things are much slower or less reliable when doing them over the network.ДЇor quite a while IвЂ™d assumed that when I eventually replaced my Drobo, IвЂ™d get a Synology NAS.

Network shares arenвЂ™t always mounted when you want them to be. It also stores my Plex and iTunes media libraries, making them available over the network to any device in the house.ДЇor the most part, the Drobo has served me well over the past six years, but there are definitely some downsides to using a NAS rather than having direct access to your data from a computer. Primarily, itвЂ™s a big pot of storage where I can throw large files that I donвЂ™t need to access frequently and take up a lot of room on the primary drives of my computers. The Drobo/home server fills a couple of roles for me. However, it got me thinking about what I wanted out of a NAS and whether the Drobo was really the best way to fill that need. This was not an insurmountable problem these were mostly old 3tb drives, so I could have just replaced a couple of them with newer, larger drives and had plenty of space.

All of the drive bays were full, so I couldnвЂ™t just throw another drive into the machine. The initial impetus for this came from the fact that my Drobo was running low on space.

I recently replaced my Drobo NAS with a Mac mini.