Mac mini as nas

[BSM]

I have a Mac Mini at home from around 2014 i5, 512 SSD, and 4 GB RAM.

 

Would it be possible to use my Mac mini with its hardware as a NAS?

Since it doesn’t have much internal storage, I was thinking of connecting one or more external SSDs.

 

I mainly want to use it with two of my SSDs one containing my media library(pled or jellyfish) and the other for Time Machine backups, which I’d like to perform over the air when I’m sitting at my desk.

 

I’d love to hear your input!

[Slottr]

Pretty sure the <2015 models just use a 2.5" drive. You can replace it with a larger SSD or HDD instead of using external drives that will be bottlenecked by USB. 

 

Media servers usually don't require much memory, but 4GB is *very* low, especially considering the backup jobs portion of this 

[porina]

1 hour ago, BSM said:

Would it be possible to use my Mac mini with its hardware as a NAS?

Since it doesn’t have much internal storage, I was thinking of connecting one or more external SSDs.

Depending on the drives, you can look at USB to multiple-bay SATA enclosures (think they come under DAS). If they're NVMe, you can still get USB adapters for those but I'm not so sure if you can get multiple in one.

 

40 minutes ago, Slottr said:

Pretty sure the <2015 models just use a 2.5" drive. You can replace it with a larger SSD or HDD instead of using external drives that will be bottlenecked by USB. 

Network bandwidth will usually limit far before USB does.

 

40 minutes ago, Slottr said:

Media servers usually don't require much memory, but 4GB is *very* low, especially considering the backup jobs portion of this 

As a pure file server that would be fine but the extra services on top may benefit from more.

[Kobathor]

Welcome to the forum!

 

If you're using it for just yourself, or a couple of users, it should be OK. I would do time machine backups when nobody else needs to use the media server functions. 

 

I will note that, since it is an Intel Mac, you have the option to install Linux if you want to squeeze a little more performance out of it. Ubuntu Server is pretty easy to set up. There are guides to set up a file server compatible with Time Machine on your other Macs.