[geeks] Replacing a Mac Pro 2006

[Mark Benson]

I am looking into buying a 2012 Ivy Bridge Mac Mini sometime in the next year
to replace my Mac Pro. I love my Mac Pro dearly, it's been a total trooper for
almost 6 years but it is getting a little long in the tooth and won't run 10.8
without a hack and that's the first sign that you're about to get left in the
Apple Tech Ghetto. Also I've compared the Ivy Bridge i7 2.6 Quad Core Mac Mini
specs against the specs of the Mac Pro I'm running and it simply blows the Mac
Pro I'm running away, computationally. I can back that up as my Games PC is a
i7 2600 rig and it also blows my Mac Pro away.

Apart from the lack of discreet graphics (slinging in 16GB of RAM ought to
solve that in part) is there anything else that should be considered a hangup?
I'd probably run an SSD inboard on the machine to mitigate the 2.5" hard drive
issue.

So I know the Mac Mini is way faster brains-wise. What I can't really cope
with however is the loss of storage bays. I have a SSD + 4 drives (2 RAID1
pairs) int he 'Pro.  I'd like to use the Thunderbolt Bus to run my storage
instead... but everyone is selling enclosures WITH drives. I've already GOT
the drives (2 are new, 2 are a year an a half old, all are SATA 600MBit and
very quiet).

Does anyone know of a 2 drive or 4 drive box with no drives for Thunderbolt?
Preferably from a UK seller but not essential?

Also I run a i7 2600 Sandy Bridge PC (Asus motherboard, NVIDIA GTX560
graphics, 8GB RAM) that's way faster than my Mac Pro. It's EFI native not BIOS
(it's got legacy mode for BIOS based stuff, not that I've ever run anything
off it that needed it) so how easy is it likely to be to run 10.8 on that
sensibly?

I'm in need of options.

--
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://markbenson.org/blog>
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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."