I think this is a really cool idea – a Mac mini with dual HDDs (no optical drive) and a copy of Snow Leopard Server. If only they had 2.5″ HDDs bigger than 500GB.

I also think Apple should have dropped a few of the USB2.0 ports and added a second gigabit ethernet port (although that would have required a motherboard change, the second HDD just requires the internal adapter and case to be modified).

Still – very cool. If I only had the spare cash…

I have a somewhat generic BlueEye O2 USB2.0/FW400 2.5″ external drive enclosure. I was recently trying to format some older laptop drives (2.5″ PATA) and discovered that the “erase” and “partition” options in Disk Utility (Mac OS X 10.5.5 version) always fail when I was connecting using USB but work fine when connecting using FireWire. The error message is along the lines of I/O error or something. I’m sure glad my MacBook has FireWire…

I wonder whether this is a limitation of the BlueEye chipset or the Disk Utility software. I really should upgrade 10.5.5 to 10.5.8 too…