Best Mac Mini For Server
Set up your Mac mini or Pro as a build server and send jobs to and from your local machine. Develop locally while the remote server builds a new version of the app, tests it, and sends it back to your local machine. The Mac mini is versatile enough to use as a home media server or small business workgroup server — you just want to make sure you're getting the right Mac mini for the task. Aim too low, and you might not get the higher performance you need. Aim too high, and you may be spending more money than.
At one time the XServe was extremely popular with certain types of business - creative agencies, video production, etc. Since Apple removed it from the lineup, I'm sure that most have moved off the old XServe hardware.
Best Mac Mini For Media Server
I've heard some anecdotes about people using Mac Minis as servers (they're cheap, and you can easily swap a hard drive with a new one) as well as some who are trying the new Mac Pros. Do you use them?
If not, what hardware did you choose instead? As background, we at Extensis build the server products Extensis Universal Type Server and Extensis Portfolio Server which can be run on either Mac or Windows server variants. We get feedback from our existing customers, but want to widen the field of feedback on where to put precious OS development efforts. For example, maybe Linux would be preferred server OS over OS X? I know of a surgery center with two offices that uses all iMacs for workstations (about 25) and a MacPro for their server. I believe it was a 2012 MacPro with Xeon quadcore, but not sure of the exact specs.
We put it in to replace a XServe machine. They used Apple Open Directory and their primary application was so it worked well for them. I personally have an older '06 MacPro at home with Xeon quadcore, 10 GBs of RAM, an SSD for my primary drive and two HDDs. Even at 8 years old, it's a beast.
I probably would not use a Mac Mini as a server because you could not have redundant storage (unless you used a NAS or SAN), but a good MacPro makes a great server for small-med environments, IMHO. They are very well made machines. I have a Mac Mini with OS X Server installed in an office where the manager insists on MAC-ONLY and ALWAYS to the detriment of remote management, replication, etc. It's cheap, I have to say that. It's quiet, which is good for SOHO.
Best Mac Mini For Video Editing
You're expected to expand by plugging in a thunderbolt disk array, and you'll need another computer with decent space for your Time Machine backups (this is the exception I insisted on - got a Synology NAS for TM backups). I do not like the software. Out of the box, it's the typical Apple configuration. Answer a few questions and Apple just continues like nothing happened.
