Apple Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server (2nd gen) review

The new Mac mini has a cousin - a server version, shorn of the DVD drive but with a second hard disk on the inside of that improbably tiny, but surprisingly heavy, alloy case. This model follows on from the server version of the old form-factor Mac mini.

The obvious question, then as now, is why buy a Mac server when it's so easy and much cheaper to assemble a pile of PC components to do the same job? The mini won't persuade everyone, but it brings a good few features that lend it appeal.

The first is the sheer density of computing power. Around ten of the old Mac minis fitted into the footprint of one 1U server, and the new version makes it even easier to pack them into a tight space: it has no separate power supply brick, nor DVD drive, and it can run sitting flat or on one edge. The included SD slot can take a 32GB card, and is bootable (although Apple would prefer you didn't use that as an everyday system drive - "for emergencies" is how the company put it to us).

You can use the two 500GB internal laptop-type hard drives as a plain pair of disks, or a mirror, or a stripe. Apple claims that lots of users of the preceding model didn't opt for an old-school RAID configuration, but instead used Time Machine to back up the boot disk to the secondary disk.

By rights, a platform such as this - whether you use OS X Server or find a way to put something else on the machine - should help to completely redefine a whole chunk of the market. Look around at the rackmount boxes running in your server room and ask if there's any job they do that wouldn't fit in a Mac mini server. While a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo is no match for Intel's latest Xeons when it comes to sheer processing muscle, and 4GB of plain DDR3 RAM seems positively miserly, it's more than enough computing power to run services such as wikis, mail servers and web servers for a 25-strong team (depending, as ever, on usage).

The other benefit of the Mac mini is that it runs on about a tenth the watts in a twentieth of the physical space of a conventional rack: we measured 11W in idle and 85W when thrashed. Despite the mains transformer being inside the alloy box, and it being the height of summer, the plume of warmish air emanating from the mini's rear never became distressed. This is in stark contrast to the old Mac mini, which can be readily found in a rack "manually" by the hot squirt of air.