2011 Mac Mini - Is SSD worth it?

Al,

You're the voice of reason with the patience of Job. It must be trying dealing with us mere mortals:-)

All kidding aside, I'm finally getting the gist of what you're saying about all the internal noise that goes on inside anything electric. One would think that it would be one of the issues manufacturers consider and deal with but alas, building to a price point would preclude that, to a degree.

All the best,
Nonoise

My understanding is when using an app like Amarra, Pure Music, and Audirvana your music will be loaded into memory first, thus making the point of ssd moot (at least in regards to music playback).

This thread is a good reference,
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1325426864

SSD does not have mechanical parts that might fail but has one tiny reliability problem - limited number of write cycles. For that reason controller shuffles location of files to minimize number of writes to particular location. There are mostly read cycles in music server application and that is just perfect for SSD. Remember to never defragment SSD because it doesn't improve anything but uses a lot of writes.

Music is always loaded into memory since HD has no timing but perhaps certain programs put whole song into memory before playing. I don't know why this would be better but you might defeat timing problems altogether by using transfer that doesn't contain timing like wireless or Ethernet. My Airport Express is bit perfect and eliminates any need for programs other than Itunes, processor speed, memory size, HD type or interface, special power supplies, computer optimization etc. Just old Mac mini plugged into different outlet across the room. You can also use computer for other tasks and it won't change a thing. The only drawback of such setup is the fact that timing has to be recreated on the other side. Since some wireless receivers like AE produce some jitter (but not a lot) it would be even better to use reclocker or jitter suppressing DAC (that contains reclocker) like my Benchmark DAC1.