I no longer have to worry about space since I can plan well ahead for that. Offered as a custom configuration of the Mac Pro 'Quad Core' 3.2 Server (Mid-2012/Nehalem), but with significant technical differences, the Mac Pro 'Twelve Core' 2.4 Server (Mid-2012/Westmere) is powered by two 2.4 GHz Six Core 32-nm Xeon E5645 (Westmere) processors with a dedicated 256k of level 2 cache for each core and 12 MB of 'fully shared. Still, I have over 2TB of media reasonably secure and all Macs are backed up via TM. Cons are that the initial investment was high and that having my iTunes library on the Drobo means I can't do a time machine backup on that. Pros were that I could grow the storage space as drives got cheaper, recycle old drives, have a safety net if drives fail and also use as a Time Machine backup. Then as the library got bigger, it was getting hard to store the media on an external drive and also back up. The rMBP should last a good few years and is definitely an improvement over the mini.įor storage space, I moved away from internal drives with the mini.

Now I use a first gen rMBP (2012) that was retired when I got my touch bar MBP. The host mac has evolved from a G4 tower bought in the late 90s to a 2009 Mac mini. Initially just music, ripping all my CDs plus some vinyl. I have had a media server in several forms since iTunes first came into being.

2012 apple mac pro server 2.4