But as an emergency backup or to reinstall the OS on the Mac mini server, an SD card will work rather nicely. Apple was clear that you don’t want to use an SD card as the normal boot device on these servers-they’re not designed for that.
#Mac mini server mid 2010 install#
One handy feature of the Mac mini server: since it supports large-capacity SD cards, you can install an OS on one and boot from it.
Apple says both the optical drive and ethernet adapter for the Air are supported by the Mac mini server, although you’re obviously not going to get the same speed from a USB ethernet adapter as you are from gigabit ethernet. If you simply must have dual ethernet ports, you can again, borrow from the MacBook Air, and use the Apple USB Ethernet Adapter ($29). If you must have an optical drive, you can get the Apple MacBook Air SuperDrive ($99), although with technology like NetBoot, that’s no longer as necessary as it once was.
Those things aren’t as off-putting as they may seem. There’s no optical drive, no redundant power supplies, and no extra ethernet ports. What you don’t get are some things considered requirements for a server. It’s not a Mac Pro, it’s not an Xserve, but it’s not useless, either. What you do get is a small form factor that ships with a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of RAM, (upgradeable to 8GB), dual 500GB 7200-rpm hard drives, one gigabit ethernet port, a FireWire 800 port, HDMI out, Mini DisplayPort, four USB 2.0 ports, an SD card slot with SDXC card support, and a nVidia GeForce 320M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM. It doesn’t require a rack, it doesn’t take up a lot of space, and doesn’t use a lot of power (around 10 watts at idle, according to Apple). However, in spite of all the things it doesn’t have, if you keep your expectations correct, the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server is a highly useful box that’s perfect as a utility server, or a do-it-all SOHO box. Up until the current generation of mini, they still had AC power bricks! What kind of server has a brick? Heck, the server version of the Mac mini doesn’t even have an optical drive. They don’t have redundant power supplies or ethernet ports. As a longtime a fan of utility servers and “the right tool for the job”, I’m still amused at how odd the idea of a Mac mini as a server can be.
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