On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
The current Mac mini "Server" model sports an i7 2.0GHz quad-core CPU and up to 16GB RAM (see OWC for that, IIRC). Two drives, up to 750GB each, or SSD's if you prefer.
The Mac mini server is quite intringuing with that low power requirement . Unfortunately... 16 GB _Non-ECC_ memory. I sure would not want to run a NAS VM on a server with non-ECC memory that cannot correct single-bit errors, at least with any data I cared much about.. When you have such a large quantity of RAM, single-bit/fade errors caused by background irradiation happen often, although at a fairly low rate. Usually on a workstation it's not an issue, because there is not a massive quantity of idle memory. If you're running this 24x7 with VMs and Non-ECC memory, it's only a question of time, before silent memory corruption results in one of the VMs. And silent memory corruption can make its way to the filesystem, or applications' internal saved data structures (such as the contents of a VM's registry database). True can be partially mitigated with backups; but the idea of VMs blue-screening or ESXi crashing with purple screen every 3 or 4 months sounds annoying.
12 frickin' watts when idle. Or thereabouts. Think about 40 watts when running full tilt, maybe a bit more.
-- -JH