- PLEX MEDIA SERVER MAC OS X LION INSTALL
- PLEX MEDIA SERVER MAC OS X LION UPGRADE
- PLEX MEDIA SERVER MAC OS X LION SERIES
You state: “While Drobo did come out with a much faster Drobo 5N, I wanted to be able to run other Applications and decided to go with a Mac Server instead of just another NAS. Since it’s a Mac I can also run apps on it and get more use out of it than a simple NAS. I’m also able to connect to it remotely via VPN, AFP or Screen Sharing. I’m happy that I finally broke down and setup this new server. If a single drive fails your data is protected. You can replace a smaller drive with a bigger drive when ever you want without having reformat or even reboot. You can put any capacity hard drives in the system you want and they don’t have to be the same capacity. Lastly I still use Drobo for the reasons I first started using Drobo. For one they now have built-in battery backups so that if data was in the middle of a transfer and the power dies, the battery would keep the internal drive going until the transfer was safely completed.
PLEX MEDIA SERVER MAC OS X LION SERIES
This new “5” series has several improvements to not only make them faster, but more reliable. On the positive side Drobo has gone through great lengths to make their products better and more stable. If all my Drobos failed right now today and the data was unrecoverable (not likely, but still…) I’d be aggravated, but I wouldn’t have lost a single file that I couldn’t get back. With that said I have multiple backups of my data both on site and offsite via. With that said, I don’t trust ANY hardware solution by ANY company to be perfect failure proof. So I’m not quite ready to throw away my investment and buy all new gear based on the experiences of others. For the many years I’ve used Drobo (I had 4 of them before adding the new 5D) I’ve yet to have any significant issues. Why Drobo? Drobo certainly has had its share of both hardware issues and PR problems and several people I know have sworn off Drobo and moved on to other solutions.
Apparently I had a bottleneck somewhere in the 3 smaller switches I was using prior to the new one. That also made a noticeable difference in speed with my exiting Drobo FS. I also took this opportunity to buy a new TrendNet 24 port “green” Switch to consolidate all my wired network connections to one switch. My Drobo 5D has 5 3TB drives in it and I share it via OS X Server. While Drobo did come out with a much faster Drobo 5N, I wanted to be able to run other Applications and decided to go with a Mac Server instead of just another NAS. By the way, before this new setup I was using a Drobo FS (basically a NAS) to share files on my network. I’ll probably also setup my FileMaker Databases on this system to access them remotely. At some point I may turn on the webserver and FTP access, but right now I just don’t need them. For me my initial services were File Sharing (AFP) and DNS. From there you configure which ever services you need. Once it downloads you launch it as an App in you Applications folder. Like Mac OS X, you now buy OS X Server (for a mere $20) via the Mac App Store.
PLEX MEDIA SERVER MAC OS X LION INSTALL
Now keep in mind that I haven’t done a Mac OS X Server install in years! I couldn’t believe how easy the process is now compared to what it was back then. Next it was time to install Mountain Lion Sever. This system rocks! Mountain Lion Server is So Easy I didn’t need this setup to look pretty since it’s going in a closet. The only thing I needed was a cheap mouse. I already had an old 19″ Samsung LED display that I wasn’t using and an Apple Keyboard from a previous system. The Drobo 5D will serve as the main storage for all my photos and other files on this server. I also added the New Drobo 5D via Thunderbolt and an mSATA card for faster reads. I upgraded the RAM to 16GB from Other World Computing. I bought a regular Mac Mini with the 256GB SSD drive. While the home server is working fine, I recently decided to bite the bullet and install a Mac server at my photography studio. I will probably keep that Mac on OS X Server 10.6 until it dies.
PLEX MEDIA SERVER MAC OS X LION UPGRADE
Since my current server did absolutely everything I needed I never saw a reason to go through an upgrade process to 10.7 or 10.8. dropping XServe products) Mac OS X Server also seemed to offer less and less features. As Apple moved away from their Server business (ie. I have a Mac Mini Server at home that is still running Mac OS X Server 10.6.8. Mac OS X Server was always a separate OS purchase and usually a separate install. Of course once Mac OS X was out and solid I migrated my AppleShare IP server to Mac OS X Server. I’ve been a user of Apple’s Server OS’s since the early days of AppleShare IP (Pre OS X).