Sadly many would say that Macs are not appropriate to use as real servers for companies, however some do and for small companies they are perfectly usable. Obviously in a home situation the concerns over the suitable of a Mac as a server are totally different.

For Mac users, there’s no better way to expand storage capacity and share files across networks than NAS.But with so many NAS solutions available for home and business use, knowing what you’ll need can be tricky. Here’s how Mac users can make the most out of NAS, and a look at the top four NAS solutions currently available. And the Mac mini is a perfect device for Plex. Your Mac, a PC, a NAS (network attached storage device), and more. You need to plan ahead as far as storage is concerned. A NAS drive that provides shared storage for everyone on your network is ideal for homes that own multiple Macs and mobile devices. Here are the 6 best NAS drives for Mac owners.

While the most common choice for storage for a Mac server these days would be an external Thunderbolt RAID solution e.g. the Promise Pegasus R4 and R6 ranges, I would agree for a home situation a NAS solution may be more appropriate.

A NAS can act as a general purpose file server for both Macs and Windows PCs, it would not require leaving the Mac on all the time, and most NAS devices do also support acting as a Time Machine backup server. However some people say that NAS based Time Machine servers are not sufficiently reliable and you should only use a genuine Apple solution such as either a Time Capsule or a Mac running Server.app and sharing a drive as a Time Machine destination.

I would agree somewhat that NAS based Time Machine systems are not going to be as reliable as a genuine Apple one but I would also probably say that they are not completely useless either. I for example use a NetGear ReadyNAS as a Time Machine system and I am happy enough with it.

Nas Server Mac Mini

By the way, for external storage there are additional options.

Nas Storage For Mac Mini Storage

• USB as you mentioned
• FireWire is still possible although you may need a Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter, you can even still get a FireWire RAID solution
• Thunderbolt like the Pegasus Promise system I mentioned
• NAS - you could connect to it via NFS and 're-share' it via AFP via the Mac server
• iSCSI over Ethernet to a NAS system, could be direct from a client or could then be 're-shared' via AFP
• Fibre-Channel using a Thunderbolt to FDDI adapter and then have a Fibre-Channel SAN setup - very expensive and often used by Video editors
• Possibly a Thunderbolt to eSATA adapter and then an eSATA storage solution