

(The Mac mini still has a FireWire 800 port, four USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, and an SDXC slot.) Not only is Thunderbolt much faster than FireWire 800, it’s an adaptable bus, even outside of using it for a display. The other major change with the Mac mini server is the new Thunderbolt port that replaces the Mini DisplayPort.
Rack mac mini server pro#
File transfers were performed with a 2.4GB disk image over a gigabit ethernet network, using a 17-inch 2.2GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro with a 5400-rpm hard drive.-Testing by John C. Internal transfers were done via CP and the time utility. Network transfers were via SCP without any optimization. Results are an average of six timed trials. Mac mini server with two 256GBSSDs (8GB RAM) Mac mini server with two 500GB 7200-rpm hard drives (4GB RAM) SSDs are fast but not cheap, and many folks may not want to pay the $1000 for them, though the performance increase is large enough to make the overall value pretty darned good.īenchmarks: Mac mini with Lion Server Platform Just for fun, I started pinging the server, and then I rebooted it. Reboots during updates happened so fast that at first I wasn’t sure they’d actually happened. The BTO Mac mini server’s internal transfer speed shows a significant jump in performance-almost double-for just over twice the cost of the standard configuration model. It’s easy to see that network bandwidth is more of a limit on a Mac mini server than internal memory/bus bandwidth or the storage devices. The network results aren’t a surprise, since all tests are done on the same network. In my limited testing, I performed file transfers of a 2.4GB disk image over a gigabit ethernet network, using a 17-inch 2.2GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro with a 5400-rpm hard drive. Let’s compare this unit to a build-to-order (BTO) 2011 Mac mini with Lion Server equipped with 8GB of RAM and a pair of 256GB solid-state drives (SSDs) for $2199. I tested the $999 standard configuration model of the Mac mini server with 4GB of RAM and a pair of 7200-rpm 500GB hard drives.
