Cracking reason 10 with hex fiend
For the purposes of this article, I’m just going to assume that you want TRIM support for your non-Apple SSD and leave it at that. In my view, quite a few of these arguments are specious and not particularly well-informed, but I’m not going to spend any time diving into that kettle of fish here. You’ll find arguments all over the web about the pros and cons of TRIM, and what it does or doesn’t do for speed or longevity.
#Cracking reason 10 with hex fiend mac os x#
If you do go down this route, however, there’s one fly in the ointment: Mac OS X provides built-in TRIM support only for Apple-installed SSDs. Given that as of this writing, a colo provider can install a 250 GB SSD for you as a boot drive for a couple of hundred dollars - and given that the 2012 Mac Mini comes either with dual 5400 RPM hard drives or dual SSDs (meaning in the latter case that you don’t then have a roomy second drive for backups and a boot drive clone) - I cannot think of any reason not to be running a Mac Mini server with a third party SSD as its primary drive. One of the great things about moving to a Mac Mini dedicated server purchased outright and housed in a colocation facility is that you can take advantage of the speed of a solid state device as your primary drive for a modest up-front cost, rather than paying for it over and over again in the form of exhorbitant rental fees to a hosting provider every month. Doing that, however, means installing a non-Apple SSD, and that means jumping through a few extra hoops to get TRIM support from OS X.
To my mind, it seems like a no-brainer to opt for a single solid state drive paired with a single spinning drive in a Mac Mini server.