I’ve been running a full tower Windows server with a dozen drives for a decade and decided to downsize. This ministack does everything I need at a fraction of the power, noise, and heat.
I use it primarily for Plex but also host a few games servers for buddies. It fits perfectly in my entertainment center.
Spent around $200 on the Mac Mini plus $600 on the drives and enclosures. I’m using SoftRAID for RAID1.
It doesn’t seem that much faster. As much as I love apple, I think you’d get more bang for your buck using a PC with specific hardware geared towards this.
Admittedly I was mostly drawn to the clean form factor of the mini stack. It’s just so pretty.
It was a happy bonus that Plex was originally designed for Mac and works flawlessly on Mac hardware.