[Vince James]

Wow, thank you all for the wonderful recommendations. MiniSAS and Space look like amazing alternatives to the hardware I was looking at.

Much of this depends on how much of a budget I can get out of the business. And frankly, there are workflow and organization issues that need to be addressed with the design team first. Part of the reason they’re so adamant about ADP over SMB is because they’re disorganized and rely on search to make up for their lack of folder structure standards.

But when the time comes, I will be referencing the suggestions here, especially just calling Studio Network Solutions 🙂

[Vince James]

Mostly stills, we have 1 video user but he tends to work off local storage and only posts finished work to the network drive.

All Mac Pro users have two internal drives, but frankly they don’t use the 2nd drive as a scratch disk like they should. Their typical work flow is to do all their work locally (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.) and then post finished work and assets to the RAID/NAS.

If I went with a mac mini I would definitely bump the ram. While I could go with a mac pro server, it would lack thunderbolt, which would push us to Fiber Channel, which would drive the cost waaay up.

Alternatively I could bump the amount of storage in their current windows server, and add a couple more GbE ports. But I don’t know how I would set up the end users to automatically take advantage of the multiple GbE ports. Also, our end-users hate that search doesn’t currently work with 10.7 and SMB shares. Are there any good alternatives out there, something in between a Mac Mini and a windows server?