Here’s a thought.

Right now, I have an M1 Mac Mini on my desk. It is great, and handles almost eveyrthing I throw at it. But there are some times my work Macbook Pro is noticeably better. And it should be– I have an M1 Pro with 32 GB of RAM.

I’ve been hoping for an M1 Pro (or by now, M2 Pro) Mac mini for a while. The Mac Studio is not too expensive– but I don’t need a fan on my desk 1. It sounds like it’s possible that device is being released tomorrow.

My Synology is old. I bought it and most of it’s drives on April 25, 2015. I’m getting worried about an important piece of equipment hitting 8 years of running mostly continuously. Amazon used to have some incredibly generous backup solutions which meant my NAS was backed up, but now it’s not. I’m currently using about 10TB of capacity.

What if I bought an OWC drive enclosure and a couple of 12TB hard drives for about $650 total? I could then connect the enclosure over USB-C to my current MacMini and put it in the same closet as the Synology, running headless. I could then use Backblaze to back up my drives, and still have two open enclosure spots to use in the future. I would be giving up RAID (for now, I suppose I could always use software-based RAID in the future), but I’d gain offsite backups.

It seems Synology has abandoned making products with good transcoding CPUs, so maybe this is a better choice? I’m also pretty confiden that the Mac mini will draw way less power and generate less heat, while being far more capable.

  1. I could get over this, I’m sure, but I don’t really need the power. THe ports would be nice, but I’ve already solved that problem at my desk. A Studio that was less loud or more judicious about it’s fan might convince me, but that product doesn’t exist. ↩︎