As an IT professional, I will make the following recommendation for hardware. The Mac Mini is an attractive small form factor computer, but it isn't suitable as a server. For any computer that is functioning as a "Server" for your valuable data, it must have two things: ECC memory, and RAID-1 disk storage. Without these two things, you will suffer corruption and loss of data. Not "if", but "when". ECC memory protects against corruption as you create and manipulate your data (music files) and RAID-1 disk storage protects against hardware failure and silent corruption in the storage of this data. You don't need to spend a lot of money to have these features either. But you skip them at your own risk - records and CD's don't go bad on their own, but without ECC memory and RAID-1 disk storage, computer-based audio will indeed go bad on its own.
