The perforated holes allow one to use zip ties for cable management. We did not scratch our units, but a softer surface would have put our minds at ease.
#Mac mini server rack mount free
We would have liked to have seen a bit of padding to keep the Mac Mini free from scratches. On that front, the unit has the rear top retention bracket with perforated holes on the horizontal cross bar. There are plenty of other options for routing, this would just make things a bit cleaner. At the same time, the notch on the inner part of this vertical support is blocked by the power button actuator so it would be nice if one could simply route the cable straight through the rear. In an open rack or man other racks it is not a big deal. In the left of the photo above which is flipped so on the right below, one improvement we would love to have seen is a notch on this side for the USB cable. The cables loop to the rear of the system and can be inserted into one of the Mac Mini’s USB ports. Apple Mac Mini Rack USB Side And Push Rod These are I/O jacks that connect via cable to the rear of the system. There are additionally two USB 3.0 Type-A ports. With this feature, one does not need to get behind the Mac Mini to power cycle the machine. One of them we needed to calibrate a bit to get the right movement distance. On two of our three Mac Mini installations, this worked out of the box. This is designed specifically to actuate the power button at the back of the Mac Mini. The small white button at the bottom of the unit is used to trigger a push rod and lever. Apple Mac Mini And Raspberry Pi Front USB And Button There are two screws at either end of the faceplate that unscrews and allows you to easily slot a Mac Mini into the mounting area. Apple Mac Mini And Raspberry Pi Rack Empty Top 2x Mini M1 Bottom We will have the top one populated in a rack later in this article. Just for some perspective of the unpopulated and the populated rack mounts, here are those two units stacked atop of one another. The company says this rack also takes older Intel-based Mac Minis. In this case, we have two of the Apple Mac Mini M1 units side-by-side, so this does not have the Raspberry Pi faceplate.
Apple Mac Mini And Raspberry Pi Rack EmptyĪll of the base units can take up to two Mac Mini’s. On the left one can see the holes for the Mac Mini but the faceplate has two spots sized for Raspberry Pi I/O. On the right, we have the holes for the bottom of the Mac Mini. Below, you can see the basic unit with a small customization. The base rack is a 1U shelf that has a number of features custom-designed for the Apple Mac Mini. Just a quick note on this, due to the nature of the solution where much of it is in-rack and installation, the video may be more informative than the written article. sent us the two versions of the rack so we could give them a try. Video Versionįor this one, we are doing a video just to give a better sense of what the solution entails:Īs always, feel free to open that in a new window so you can see what is going on. As a result, we ended up with a 5-node Arm cluster neatly packed in 2U of rack space. The folks at are both STH readers, and also a company with a solution to rackmount both the Mac Mini and Raspberry Pi in the same 1U chassis. Still, adding the Mac Mini to our racks seemed like a challenge given its form factor. A new Arm-based Mac with solid performance and low power consumption in a form factor that aligned with Project TinyMiniMicro nodes seemed like a winning proposition. When the Apple Mac Mini M1 was released, we were intrigued to say the least.
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