OWC recently announced their customization options for the Mac Mini. While 12TB of storage might seem a bit much, a lot of people are using Mac Minis as their sole home computer, especially when they've combined it with a laptop. The question is, who should consider powering up their Mac Mini?
This upgrade scheme by OWC involves sending in your own Mac Mini. These new Minis come with an internal Blu-ray burner, Elgato's EyeTV Hybrid tuner, more RAM, and an Apple Remote. The extra storage comes in the form of an additional Mercury Elite Al Pro Q×2 4-bay storage server, which allows you up to 12TB of storage. Naturally, don't expect the storage server to be cheap, but it's a definite possibility for people wanting a place to store all of their family's media.
There is no word yet on price, but the internal upgrades on the Mac Mini might be worthwhile for certain users. If you are using a Mac Mini as your sole home computer/HTPC, then these upgrades might be well worth the price, as they will boost the performance of your Mini well beyond what Apple initially intended. The inclusion of an internal Blu-ray burner makes it easier to cut down on other devices for playback options.
So if you're using a MacBook Pro or another type of laptop as your mobile workstation and a Mac Mini at home, this is something you should consider. Or you could also just buy a cheaper PC-based HTPC, from Acer, Asus, and other manufacturers. They do come with Blu-ray players and a bunch of other options.
(via Ubergizmo, images via OWC and Image: Flickr member Sigalakos licensed for use under Creative Commons)
The Ultimate Used Furniture Cleaning Kit
Ana Creates a Community at Home
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Z2 iPod Dock and Wi...
Soda Recipe: Homemade Ginger Ale
Recipe: Spring Fruit and Nut Tabouli
As someone with a new mac mini and terabytes of video this is an awesome setup. 1080p with bluray, netflix, vudu, hulu, or any video delivery system you can think of comes at a cost. This cost for the most part is the UGLY UI attached. With a mac mini and plex you suddenly have the most beautiful media center that even your parents can use.
I may be against the grain here.. But I think that the best media centers are the one that don't try to do everything... Sure you can record 1080i with the above set up.. but doing so means can't hardly play a movie because of the processor usage.... Same with blu-ray recording. Try finding what you want in 12 tb of a library or even loading all the the movie pictures into your playback device.. I say for the same money buy a mac mini and WD TV Hub or better yet older imac and new mac mini and a few 1tb, 2tb or 3tb externals. Retaining a huge library on your playback device slows down your playback. Keep a small collection (under 500mb on your playback device) and a larger one on the encode device. Most of things you are saving are things you won't watch again or may never watch again, but want to keep.... Plus all those things you are downloading, encoding, etc really hog CPU usage.. You don't need to spend the money for a raid .. when you don't need the collection all in one place for playback. I say why build the best when two oks are better and cheaper..
@isaac: I agree, but I'm lucky enough to have Cat-5 in the walls. We stream our 720p content from the office upstairs to our HTPC in the living room. We've chosen to avoid 1080p, as 720 is more than pretty enough, and uses less room and CPU during playback.