It seems Apple managed to update its Mac Mini, with 9400M hardware and all — without a Blu-ray drive. The stabbing may commence.
It’s also HDMI deficient, meaning you’ll need a DVI > HDMI dongle (or Mini Display-Port > HDMI if you’re willing to get unofficial), and to push your sound through a receiver via optical audio. Not necessarily a deal breaker for the high end, rather annoying for the low to mid-end.
The Mac Mini. Now with more graphical power doing absolutely nothing.
I’ve had the good fortune to play with LG’s BE06LU10 external Blu-ray player, but sadly it arrived too late to test in conjunction with the new Mac Mini to see if the CPU had enough grunt to run a heavy VC-1 decode. I suspect it does, but wouldn’t mind proof before laying down AUD$1049 for the Mac Mini, and then another AUD$400 for the LG. Given the aesthetic is totally different for both devices though, upon a successful test I’d be more likely to gut the Mac Mini DVD drive and insert a slot loading Blu-ray.
LG's BE06LU10 external Blu-ray drive while fine by itself, would likely ruin the aesthetic of the Mac Mini.
Given the failure of the Mac Mini to capitalise on the streaming/Blu-ray market, and Ion’s inability to process VC-1 without frame skipping, it seemed like I was going to have to fall back on a homebrew solution, until I spotted this — MSI has a contender for the best all-in-one solution with its Wind Box DE200, also based on the seemingly ever-expanding 9400M chipset. While the 2GHz Celeron M 550 CPU is a worry, it’s a Socket P-based solution, meaning it can at least be upgraded to a 2.266GHz Celeron M 570, and if the chipset supports, a Core 2 Duo mobile processor. Hopefully MSI will take the guesswork out for us and just release a higher model version.
MSI's Wind Box DE200 - with a little more CPU, this could be the all in one we're looking for. Image credit: Engadget
On the server front, Areca have been darlings and released what we’ve been waiting for in controllers — an internal 16 port SAS HBA with no RAID engine, to keep the costs down, in the form of the ARC-1300ix-16. Best of all, it has Solaris support out of the box. Looks like we have our target, now we just need to wait for a local release.
The Areca ARC-1300ix-16 goes for CAD$499, has no RAID engine and comes with Solaris support. It's love at first sight, so long as it comes out in Australia. Image credit: Tweakers.net
In bad news, Anand gives us all a reason why we have to wait a little longer for SSDs to really live up to the promise, as they get slower over time. Unless you want to drastically shorten their lifespan by continuously hard wiping them, that is. This is a shame, as the improvement in Windows UI snappiness (loading an expanded Control Panel from the Start Menu is near instant) is almost entirely worth it on its own.
In other news, while the new Xeon 5500 setups have me crying at the ridiculous performance that can be made available with wads of cash, I’m sure my setup will do just fine within the confines of home use. The bought hardware seems to test well, short of the MSI P7n Diamond continuously resetting the boot order to what it thinks is smart rather than using the options set by the user. If there’s a USB drive left in or a new hard drive hooked up, it tries to boot off that. If you finish installing an OS off the optical drive, it sets the primary boot device to the hard drive where the OS is installed. Extremely frustrating and vastly stupid on behalf of the MSI engineers.
