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Our Rev9 server is now powered by a diminutive but power-packing Mac Mini. Who would have ever thought so much Mac could be packed into such a small package? Well, O.K. iBooks and PowerBooks are small too, but this is a desktop Mac.
Of course it comes in the usual (but spectacular) Apple packaging (if you have never bought an Apple product, you don't know the appreciation that comes from seeing the effort Apple puts into its packaging and you haven't enjoyed the experience of just opening the package).
Some first impressions: This is a really nice machine. The built-in speaker sounds weak and tinny, but that is all I can find wrong with this Mac Mini. A server doesn't need good sound output, so I don't care about the quality of the built-in speaker. If you are going to use this as a home Mac and plan on listening to music, you will want to hook up some good powered speakers.
The machine runs silent and is quite zippy. It certainly feels equal to the performance of the full-size desktop I had been running as the Rev9 server. And that machine was no slouch.
Transferring the data from the old machine was amazingly easy. I had previously moved the hard drive from the old machine to a firewire external drive case, and when I booted up the Mini for the first time, the software asked if I wanted to transfer my data from my old machine to the new one. Normally at this step, you're supposed to boot your old machine into firewire disk mode, but since I already had the drive in a firewire enclosure, to the Mini it looked like a Mac already running in firewire disk mode. I just let the software handle the transfer. There's a lot of tweaking that went into getting the Rev9 server to run just-so, and I was a little apprehensive when I booted the Mac Mini for the first time after the data transfer. My worry was for naught. The new Mac Mini just picked up where the old machine left off, and we were running.
I won't replace my full-size desktop for heavy duty work like video editing-- at least not until I have had more time to put this machine through its paces. Plus I'm a geek and like getting into the guts of the hardware once in a while. There's not much you can do to this Mac Mini to tweak the innards. On the other hand, that may be a good thing...
Posted by Scott Girard on 2/2/05; 11:04:54 PM
from the News dept.
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