[rdl]

I would have gone with a 15" rMBP; I assume he was only considering a 13" rMBP.

I bought a Mac Mini 2.6 GHz i7 a month or so ago, and added a 240GB M500 SSD, 16GB RAM, and 4 x 4TB external HDDs. Pretty happy with it performance-wise, even for Final Cut. I'd probably get an Areca ARC-8050 8-drive Thunderbolt RAID (http://www.areca.us/products/thunderbolt.htm) if I needed faster storage beyond 100GB, though. It's mostly a Plex server, VMware server (although I just use Fusion at home), and testing some proxy/etc. stuff, and is connected only to a 1080p projector and 5.1 HT system. I figure not much will get upgraded on the Mini in the next 6 months -- maybe no upgrade at all, or if it is upgraded, only some pretty irrelevant-to-me stuff.

[dubya]

It seems like the Mac Mini was dismissed too quickly. It and the Air have i7s, but the one in the Mac Mini has four cores. The geekbench numbers look to be about 1000 units(?) under the hackintosh he built, so ~8% performance loss for considerably less hassle. The Mini is more expensive as well, but will hold its value much better than the hackintosh if he wants the new Mac Pro in a couple of years.

[jlgaddis]

> ... and added a 240GB M500 SSD ...

This is a long shot but would you happen to know anything about the built-in encryption on this drive?

I bought the 480 GB version a few months ago to put in a new laptop and the primary reason I chose the M500 is because it is a "Self-Encrypting Drive". IIUC, third-party software is required to actually benefit from that -- but I'm not sure that I do understand correctly.

[rdl]

Yeah, it is standard Opal, but I just use FileVault 2. I find AES-NI supported FileVault performance to be more than adequate. I don't know of anything but Wave which does Opal key management for OSX, particularly for boot drives.

I use Fusion Drive with the 1TB drive I already had, too, so SED on just one of those drives wouldn't help.

[jlgaddis]

A very similar situation here, although I'm running Linux on this machine and not OS X. I feel that the SED stuff (while technically true) is misleading -- I specifically chose this drive over cheaper and better drives because of this feature. Lesson learned, though.

The only thing I could ever find for Linux that supported Opal was "SecureDoc for Linux" which, apparently, is impossible to get ahold of unless you're an enterprise with a fat bank account. Fortunately, like with FileVault, dm-crypt (which also leverages AES-NI) is more than sufficient for my needs.

Thanks for the reply.

[rdl]

It shouldn't be too hard to do a SED control utility fundamentally. It is maybe a licensing or TCG membership issue though. I thought it was just some extra drive commands.