Geek Posted October 24, 2010 Posted October 24, 2010 The new-form-factor Mac Mini gets its server version, is it better than building a PC server of your own? 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. Source: CRN Tech
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