TooMuchGreen

I’m a huge fan of the Mac Mini and think it has been one of Apples most under developed and under rated units, in fact I’m on my 3rd one at the moment now the MacBook Air has been eBayed. Needs as must however and although it’s the somewhat older 1.42ghz G4 model it’s no real detriment to me as (compared to the video hungry masses) all my own daily apps are probably as low end as you can get these days (“Terminal” isn’t that resource intensive). Obviously I would relish the prospect of owning an 8 core Mac Pro but I honestly have no need for one.

The new Mac Mini “Server” is a most welcome addition to the range and although not yet in the realms of what would be classed as real server technology it’s certainly heading in the right direction with it’s two hard disks, redundancy is the name of the game when it comes to servers and multiple drive RAID configurations are a must.

With a mere two disk offering your options or still somewhat limited and in this instance you’d be advised to opt for RAID 1 (mirrored disks), yes you lose half of the available storage space by doing so but the other option for a two disk setup, RAID 0, merely stripes data across both drives. Although RAID 0 does provide a performance increase two disk stripe sets offer no inherent redundancy, if one disk fails it’s game over for all your data (unless you’ve backed it up of course).

Ideally I’d have liked Apple to have added an extra ethernet port for network redundancy, adapter teaming options and as provision for limited LTSP, after all if they’re tagging this model as a server then what need is there for a bank of four USB ports? You only need one to rebuild the system (there’s no DVD drive in this model).

Technical shortfalls aside it’s the form factor and power efficiency of the Mini which are the winners here. During 2007 I ran a clients property management website from an OSX 10.4 Server enabled G4 Mini sat in the airing cupboard of my current lodgings at that time in Harrogate, the web link was provided via DynDNS across an 8mb Orange home internet connection and everything ran quite literally problem free for six months until we migrated it to some “real” hosting. Page delivery times were more than acceptable and apart from the notably generic web address provided by the free DynDNS service there was no other indication of it’s rather interesting location.

A few years ago there was talk of the Mini drifting into end of line but with increasingly realised adoption for it’s amazing versatility and new forays into Mini Server world it’s nice to see it now standing even taller in the line up.

Good things come in small packages.