Snow Leopard server

Just before the hol­i­days I invested in Apple’s new server offer­ing for small firms and work­groups, the Mac Mini Snow Leop­ard Server. It’s a sweet package.

For $999 you get a whisper-quiet, energy-efficient server not much larger than a paper­back book. The device comes with 4GB of RAM and a ter­abyte of built-in stor­age, plus an unlim­ited client license to Apple’s pow­er­ful server soft­ware (10.6.x Snow Leopard).

Apple claims this com­bi­na­tion of hard­ware and soft­ware can han­dle up to 25 con­cur­rent users. To han­dle more users would require more pow­er­ful hard­ware. I’ve been using it to serve a hand­ful of con­cur­rent users, and it’s plenty fast. But it’s not per­fect, and here’s why…

Revised on February 7, 2010