Mac mini server with raid 0 running final cut studio.

After months of research and still a lot of unanswered questions I took the plunge and bought a mac mini server. The main aim is to run final cut faster than my old 1GHz mini computer.

My first job was to set up the raid 0. This caused my first problem. As my computer is linked up to a HD ready tv (not full HD) Leppard don't seem to like the fact it runs at 1360 x 768 over HDMI. This caused the screen to be drawn larger than the tv hiding the menu bar, so I missed the option to go to the disc utility when first installing. Found it on the second attempt. The raid is a bit quirky as you have to drag both the drive into the setup to raid them together. I went for a 125kb stripe size. The second install seemed to be quicker...

Once up and running the next step was to install final cut. Went for a full install of almost 50Gb which is not a problem in the nice new 1Tb partition. The problem was, for some reason, the installation took over 6 hours!

Not sure if this was a problem with the USB transfer speed from the external LG DVD drive but it would start of saying something like 8 minutes to install, then go up to 200 hours and take about an hour per disk.

Still this gave me time to set up some if the server preferences, watch two football games and a movie while waiting. Also found I could not share the network connection with my old mac like you can with normal OS X. Apparently there is a way but a bit more complex, so I left that alone for now.

With final cut motion was unticked by default but I installed it anyway to see if it works. On my previous mini both motion and color would not work, so I was hoping they would with the new server.

Finally after a very long wait it is installed and I restarted and gave final cut a quick run...

Unfortunately none of the Final Cut apps would run at the highest resolution I could get out of my machine and eventually got my machine into a state where my tv could not display the output. So a reinstall was in order. Fearing another 6 hour reinstall of Final Cut I was happily surprised to see that the reinstall just replaced the OS files and left all the Final Cut app on the machine.

Leaving Final Cut aside I set about transferring all my apps over and setting up the web servers, mail, iTunes, video tools and Googel's Picasa.

Everything is fast and snappy and
Picasa crunched throughout 35,000+ photos and grabbed the faces in an impressive time.

I have a feeling Final Cut is going to work like a dream when I get my new monitor tomorrow.