Mac Minis are horrible server hardware. We've had a couple running as servers. They fail randomly. Their hard drives fail. They don't rack mount easily. The only reason to have them is if you inherit some old ones, don't want to throw them away, and then don't mind replacing and throwing failed units away pretty often.
Yap. I really depends on the type of loading. In other words I didn't mean "servers" as in necessarily web servers just machines that handle server loads. In this case it just means constants high CPU and disk churn. So if this is a high contention test rack, running tests non-stop its hardware will experience a server type level of stress.
They do but we found that mac minis do so more often. I have a sample of about 15 out of say 100+ other regular 1U rack mountable machines. Mac minis failed at a much higher rate.
The worst part is that some failures were not a 'stop dead failure' where it was easy to detect and replace. Some would just freeze intermittently, some just got really slow.
One could tell that there is a practical difference between server grade and consumer grade components. In retrospect time spent debugging and messing with this was probably not worth the gain in density and the cost.
These were 2009-2011 mac minis (the previous generation). Hard drive failures and complete freezes were the major problems we saw. Freezes were random but clustered on the same set of machines. Over time they got worse. We never found what it was exactly (except the hard drives), and of course, replacing components is not a quick easy job when it comes to Apple.
