OS X Mountain Lion Server For Dummies

Big, Fast External Storage

A server can never have too much storage, and speed doesn’t hurt either. So how about 6 terabytes (TB) connected to your Mac with a Thunderbolt cable?

Yes, I did talk about the need for storage in Chapter 2. But I didn’t give specifics. Here are two storage devices that will make your mouth water:

The LaCie 2big Thunderbolt Series from LaCie (www.lacie.com) is a case that holds two hot-swappable drives. If one fails, pull it out without shutting off the unit. Drives get bigger every year, but as of this writing the 2big comes in 4TB and 6TB sizes. You can use the two drives separately as drives or together as a RAID for redundancy. These are 7200 rpm drives with promised transfer rates up to 327MB/s, according to LaCie. Storage costs are also changing all the time, but at publishing time, the big 2big cost less than a Mac mini server.

If you want to spend as much as a Mac Pro, there’s the 12TB, 6-disk Pegasus R6 RAID System, also with the Thunderbolt interface, from Promise (www.promise.com). The promise of Promise is that the enclosure will deliver 800MB/s of speed. By the way, 12TB would hold 1300 full length movies, 3 million songs, or 2.6 trillion pages of text.