Finally - DUAL DRIVE Mac Mini

In the FCP Hacker Labs we love Mac Mini's, since they are small and quiet, and can be a part of an awesome Compressor Cluster render. - FCP Hacker designed multiple mockups to save rack space in data centers using these wonderful devices and viewed some super secret documentation as to why apple put's out a product like this, and what Apple Pro Services deploy them for. Our experiments involved having up to 8 of these things connected via Gig-E on a desk to help with Compressor Encodes and renders. Finally apple dropped the other shoe and put this gem out, the downside is not the missing optical drive, its actually an upside, it was as useless as a door-knob, unless you plan to make an entertainment center PC - the new Mac Mini Server edition sports 2 SATA3.0 ports (that means RAID-1) that means fault tolerant, that means awesome, that means install OS over network. That means shove up-to 9 x of them per 2 rack units in your machine room. -

So you can have 216 of these in a 48 standard machine rack. Yes 216. Even more if you're crazy.

http://www.apple.com/macmini/server/

Downsides:

- The CPU is now soldered onto this thing (no socket)
- Server OS license makes the price jump $300.00
- Still no Express34 i/o expansion (even though a prototype existed for a while)


But apple is finally analysing the Mac Mini implementations the more serious of their customers were using all along.

The NVIDIA 9400M is not there for your monitor or to play Quake,its to allow Studio 2 - Studio 3 applications that use the GPU assisted rendering to actually have access to a fast enough GPU. You should only manage these via Apple Remote Desktop, and since they come with a DC power brick, you can create a replacement connector that puts power to many with out having to store the individual power-bricks.

#apple-not-fail

Say hello to the Non-Machine room power eating, overheating Open Diretory/DNS/Final Cut server for your boutique graphics design/edit shop.

The only thing this won't be able to do is act as a Metadata controller for XSan (no friggen FC-AL adapter - since there is no friggen Express34.)

I'm sure the folks at 123 MacMini forums are discussing the pro's and con's of this device to no end.

Me - I give this a thumbs up. Twice...