Your experience & thoughts on SSDs for MacMini

03-07-11: Perrew
I thought regular HDDs did sequential (what most programs do) loadings faster than SSDs?

That was true in some cases a few years ago, but no longer. As a rough ballpark, I would expect a typical SATA2 SSD today to provide sustained read transfer rates of around 200 MB/sec. I'd be surprised if the stock HDD in the OP's several year old Mac Mini could do more than around 50 MB/sec, and perhaps even less.

And of course in terms of random access times, which are particularly important for an operating system drive, the SSD would probably be more than 100x faster.

Regards,
-- Al

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.

I still kind of fail to see what the SSDs do for sonics, are they having lesser electrical noise?
You say the drive dont matter because it all is loaded into memory so why then use a SSD?
How do you play High-Res files?

Prpixel,

I thought regular HDDs did sequential (what most programs do) loadings faster than SSDs?
Do you copy the music from the external to the internal when you want to listen a song? What type of power supplies do you run, battery or Linear PS?
Cheers P

03-07-11: Perrew
I still kind of fail to see what the SSDs do for sonics, are they having lesser electrical noise?

If the music data is being output from the computer directly into a dac, via usb or firewire or s/pdif, it would certainly seem conceivable that replacing an hdd with an ssd might affect (and hopefully improve) jitter levels and noise levels on the signal supplied to the dac. How much of a difference that would make would obviously be dac-dependent.

If the music data is being output from the computer via ethernet or wireless, and assuming that the link works reliably and consistently, I would be surprised if going to an ssd would make any sonic difference. Although I would not totally rule out the possibility that rfi effects could come into play in some setups.

Regards,
-- Al