Your experience & thoughts on SSDs for MacMini

The Mac OS doesn't support the Trim command yet which means the drive will slow down over time. The more expensive OWC drives with the longer warranties are enterprise class drives. They have more overpervisioning for longer life. I've been using nothing but SSD's for the last few years in all my machines for boot drives. I've had three failures in the last year. two which were OWC Enterprise drives. When SSD's fail, the fail without any warning. One day you machine is working fine, the next day the drive is just gone. So, i've got in the habit of backinb up often. BTW i keep my music on machanical drives with multiple backups.

Ed,

I couldn't imagine life without SSD's. They are so much quicker and quieter than mechanical drives. My desktop machine boots in 14 seconds before I'm on the internet. My laptop takes 20 seconds to do the same. I have 6 computers here and they are all running SSD's.

The drives that failed were all due to a bug with S3 sleep. It took almost a year before the manufacturer of the controller chip recognized that there was a problem. A firmware update to fix the problem should be out any day now. What's spooky is that they all failed within a few days of the four month mark. It was just an annoyance because I backup religiously and can do a clean install and turn around my machine in 2-3 hours.

Yes, SSD's do make a difference with sound quality. I imagine this is because of the speed of them and the operating system having to work less/faster to buffer data.

On another note, my music server is based an a FitPC2 which fits in the palm of my hand. It boots from an SSD and the music is kept on two external 2.5" drives. It runs 24/7 and I update it like once every 6 months. At idle it draws 4 watts; under load never more than 11 watts. It's 100% silent and air cooled. I have five squeezeboxes and multiple computer that access it and it's never had a problem serving multiple streams.

No, SSD's are a lot faster the mechanical drives. A pair of velociraptors in a raid array might come close to a mid level SSD but your talking a lot more noise, heat and space. Right now I'm waiting for the new Sandforce 2000/SATA 6Gb based SSD's to start shipping. These will be as fast as Sandforce 1200 drives in a raid array. Hey, I'll be able to shave a few more seconds off of my boot times. I do a lot of photo editing, with very large files, and the SSd's make a world of difference with swapping data in and out of main memory

There's no reason to copy from the mechanical drives to an SSD to listen to a song. Everything gets buffered in memory no matter where your listening. Again, the big advantage is quicker access and less overhead for the CPU.

When I listen on my desktop I just use the standard power supply in the computer case. The desktop rig consists of a Bel Canto C5I integrated amp driving Gallo Reference Strada's with a custom subwoofer. Also, I have a Bolder Cable Modified Squeezebox touch with a modified Jerome Industries linear power supply for when I want to listen while the computer is off or if I just want to listen to Rhapsody or Pandora.

In my Main music system I have a heavily modified Squeezebox 2 with the Bolder Cable Ultimate Nirvana Linear power supply with the Bybee Music Rails.

I rip Cd's on my main computer and then use Synctoy to move them over to the music server and to backup.