Apple Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server review

Apple has finally woken up to the possibilities of its Mac mini form factor: it isn't just home users who have fallen in love with a home computer the size of a car radio, there are businesses out there running complete web-hosting farms on racks filled with Mac minis, two or three to a shelf.

But there's been a problem: running OS X Server on a Mac mini was never going to be sustainable while it had only one laptop-sized hard disk. To fix the single drive problem, Apple had to remove the CD drive - the second hard disk inside this machine sits right where you find the CD in other Mac minis.

Instead, Apple relies on other Macs hosting a CD for it to do an OS reload. In fact, if you're going to use the Mac mini server seriously, you should do this on day one, because by default the pair of 500GB drives inside the machine aren't set up as a mirror. They're just disks.
Apple said the decision to leave the disks "simple" was down to there being no strong case for any of the three possibilities (simple, mirrored, or striped). We're torn about this, because the people who should be giving the Mac mini server serious consideration are IT professionals who are unlikely to have a nearby Mac able to donate a CD drive remotely. Not all USB CDs are bootable by the Mac mini firmware, so those wanting a mirrored drive setup should add £56 exc VAT to their budget for the external SuperDrive.

That aside, what is it about this device that promotes it from the ranks of either home trinket, or smug designer-priced NAS box competitor? The answer is, Snow Leopard Server. Look around the market at NAS boxes that come with roughly this much storage, and you'll see cut-down operating systems or poorly coded management utilities.

Here, Apple includes a full unlimited-user copy of its mainstream, datacenter-ready operating system. This provides services for mail, network authentication, VPN, DNS, DHCP, an internal Chat server, BlackBerry-style remote access for iPhones, Group Calendaring (not just for Mac clients), and a web server pre-loaded with cute templates for user blogs and wikis. MySQL is present and ready to configure, and there's plenty of built-in facilities to connect to a pre-existing Active Directory user authentication service in a big Windows network.
Yet, this is still a Mac mini. There's but one Gigabit Ethernet port, which means several parts of Snow Leopard Server are going to require a USB-to-Ethernet adapter to really deliver - you can't load-balance, team a connection or make sensible use of internet connection sharing with only one Ethernet port. The five USB ports help a little bit, and also note that the back of the box only has mini-DisplayPort and mini-DVI ports (there's a DVI adapter included in the package). The last connector to mention may be the most interesting: a FireWire 800 port provides access to more disk space, with a Promise box already on offer
Any sense of frustration at the limits of the form factor are swept away when you see just how capable Snow Leopard Server is - and how enjoyable it is to use in practice. For example, the Mac mini automatically used a Microsoft mouse (which wasn't recognised by Windows XP); when we plugged a terabyte USB-connected disk into the machine on which to load our test data, Snow Leopard Server discovered it was formatted as NTFS - and it both mounted it and then honoured the folder security so we couldn't copy our data; or consider that the setup routine, which fires up at first power on, automatically named the machine by reverse lookup on the static IP address we gave it - not just for IP naming, but all the other services too.

Fitting everything that should be said about this device into a single page is every bit as hard as fitting all the hardware and processing power (now a nippy 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM from new) into the tiny Mac mini case. It adds up to a massively persuasive bundle of hardware and software. If you've never before been tempted to step outside the Windows server world, it's an excellent first choice.

Price when reviewed: £695 (£799 inc VAT)